3 ms·

The extent to which the lack of universal open access is impeding human progress seems impossible to measure, but this gives us a tiny hint.

PythonicAlpha 12y ago
Yes, the speed of innovation is growing with accessibility to knowledge. In the middle ages, access to knowledge and science was very limited. Thus also innovation was also limited to a few people. This should make people understand, that hiding knowledge away in obnoxious expensive science publications is one of the biggest hindrances to innovation today. Science knowledge (when it is the truth) never grows old. Or would you think one moment, that the wheel is an invention so old, that we don't need it any more?
- vcjohnson 12y ago
  >This should make people understand, that hiding knowledge away in obnoxious expensive science publications is one of the biggest hindrances to innovation today. I'm still not sure how we get away with publishing items behind paywalls when a large percentage of the funding comes from the NSF/tax dollars. As an undergraduate, I was co-authored on two papers in fairly prestigious astronomical journals. The irony? I can't link my papers to potential employers or interested parties through the journal - I have to upload to arXiv to show people.
- saretired 12y ago
  Progress on open access is slow. 6 or 7 years ago I wanted to read a couple of papers by Cayley, who died in 1895. These were published in the Transactions of the Royal Society--and paywalled. (Google Books had a few volumes of his collected papers available, but not the one I needed.) A few years ago, the Royal Society finally made papers published before the mid-20th century available for free, which is progress, but considering the public funding for the Royal Society, it's hard to understand why anything they publish is still paywalled for 70 years.
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  Well, a traditional wheel, made from three wooden boards (|), doesn't see much application today. ;)
  - PythonicAlpha 12y ago
    But when it would have been patented then by one of todays patent attorneys and the patent would still be valid, you could trash our modern life!
_delirium 12y ago
I wonder if the increase in the percentage of citation to older articles is related to the overall access situation getting better, though? Not that long ago, >10 yr old scientific articles were often quite difficult to access: shunted into "old journal" paper archives somewhere in a basement, from which they had to be specially requested. The library shelves typically only held 5-10 years of recent journal issues, and digitization efforts (at least in science) typically started with only the recent issues as well. To make matters worse, the old issues were rarely full-text indexed, so you might never even discover something relevant existed in the first place, much less try to access it. Nowadays an article from 1965 might randomly come up in a Google Scholar search, which was not the case in, say, 2002. A more speculative hypothesis: this relates to the general "flattening" of the literature, as people relate to it more via search and less via subscriptions. People no longer really read journals as periodicals, or even use a specific journal's index as a search aid, but rather search entire archives for things. So it now matters less not only where something was published, but also when it was published.
- niels_olson 12y ago
  Alternate hypothesis: less overall original research in general because we're not actually building on the new stuff, just continuously almost replicating results because no one bothered to read the new stuff.
- beloch 12y ago
  Access is huge, and improved search algorithms probably help significantly too. Let's take the field of quantum cryptography as an example. How did it get started? This paper (the famous Bennett and Brassard, 1984 protocol, a.k.a. BB84): http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/files/us-bennetc/BB84highest.pdf http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/files/us-bennetc... This is quantum physics. Look at where it was published. Proceedings for a CPSC conference in Bangalore. Bangalore! This paper started an entire field that entire departments at multiple universities are devoted to now. If it hadn't been so radical at the time it would have made it into a high impact journal. Instead, IEEE conference proceedings, Bangalore. I went through grad-school in this field. This paper started it all so, needless to say, I wanted to see an original copy of it. I never found one. These conference proceedings were not widely distributed. People passed around copies of copies of copies and there were, of course, reprints in other publications. I had to borrow a book that included this paper as a chapter from my supervisor, and that wasn't long ago. The only reason I was able to read this field-creating paper was because, even though the peer-reviewed journals that should have jumped at the chance to publish this work balked, other people recognized something good in it. Today, a pdf of the original is linked to by Wikipedia. How much bold, radical, totally unpublishable (in any respectable journal) work is out there waiting to be dusted off and used to start new fields of study? BB84 could have slipped through the cracks. It's a safe bet that other such work actually did go unnoticed. We can only stand on the backs of those who came before us if we can access their work. I don't know if what we're experiencing today is an information revolution, but I'm willing to bet, in a few decades time, we'll be able to look back on the march of scientific progress and see a huge boost in research productivity when our ability to distribute and search through existing research started to catch up to the pace of its production.

PythonicAlpha 12y ago

Yes, the speed of innovation is growing with accessibility to knowledge. In the middle ages, access to knowledge and science was very limited. Thus also innovation was also limited to a few people. This should make people understand, that hiding knowledge away in obnoxious expensive science publications is one of the biggest hindrances to innovation today. Science knowledge (when it is the truth) never grows old. Or would you think one moment, that the wheel is an invention so old, that we don't need it any more?

vcjohnson 12y ago
>This should make people understand, that hiding knowledge away in obnoxious expensive science publications is one of the biggest hindrances to innovation today. I'm still not sure how we get away with publishing items behind paywalls when a large percentage of the funding comes from the NSF/tax dollars. As an undergraduate, I was co-authored on two papers in fairly prestigious astronomical journals. The irony? I can't link my papers to potential employers or interested parties through the journal - I have to upload to arXiv to show people.
saretired 12y ago
Progress on open access is slow. 6 or 7 years ago I wanted to read a couple of papers by Cayley, who died in 1895. These were published in the Transactions of the Royal Society--and paywalled. (Google Books had a few volumes of his collected papers available, but not the one I needed.) A few years ago, the Royal Society finally made papers published before the mid-20th century available for free, which is progress, but considering the public funding for the Royal Society, it's hard to understand why anything they publish is still paywalled for 70 years.
thaumasiotes 12y ago
Well, a traditional wheel, made from three wooden boards (|), doesn't see much application today. ;)
- PythonicAlpha 12y ago
  But when it would have been patented then by one of todays patent attorneys and the patent would still be valid, you could trash our modern life!

_delirium 12y ago

I wonder if the increase in the percentage of citation to older articles is related to the overall access situation getting better, though? Not that long ago, >10 yr old scientific articles were often quite difficult to access: shunted into "old journal" paper archives somewhere in a basement, from which they had to be specially requested. The library shelves typically only held 5-10 years of recent journal issues, and digitization efforts (at least in science) typically started with only the recent issues as well. To make matters worse, the old issues were rarely full-text indexed, so you might never even discover something relevant existed in the first place, much less try to access it. Nowadays an article from 1965 might randomly come up in a Google Scholar search, which was not the case in, say, 2002. A more speculative hypothesis: this relates to the general "flattening" of the literature, as people relate to it more via search and less via subscriptions. People no longer really read journals as periodicals, or even use a specific journal's index as a search aid, but rather search entire archives for things. So it now matters less not only where something was published, but also when it was published.

niels_olson 12y ago
Alternate hypothesis: less overall original research in general because we're not actually building on the new stuff, just continuously almost replicating results because no one bothered to read the new stuff.
beloch 12y ago
Access is huge, and improved search algorithms probably help significantly too. Let's take the field of quantum cryptography as an example. How did it get started? This paper (the famous Bennett and Brassard, 1984 protocol, a.k.a. BB84): http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/files/us-bennetc/BB84highest.pdf http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/files/us-bennetc... This is quantum physics. Look at where it was published. Proceedings for a CPSC conference in Bangalore. Bangalore! This paper started an entire field that entire departments at multiple universities are devoted to now. If it hadn't been so radical at the time it would have made it into a high impact journal. Instead, IEEE conference proceedings, Bangalore. I went through grad-school in this field. This paper started it all so, needless to say, I wanted to see an original copy of it. I never found one. These conference proceedings were not widely distributed. People passed around copies of copies of copies and there were, of course, reprints in other publications. I had to borrow a book that included this paper as a chapter from my supervisor, and that wasn't long ago. The only reason I was able to read this field-creating paper was because, even though the peer-reviewed journals that should have jumped at the chance to publish this work balked, other people recognized something good in it. Today, a pdf of the original is linked to by Wikipedia. How much bold, radical, totally unpublishable (in any respectable journal) work is out there waiting to be dusted off and used to start new fields of study? BB84 could have slipped through the cracks. It's a safe bet that other such work actually did go unnoticed. We can only stand on the backs of those who came before us if we can access their work. I don't know if what we're experiencing today is an information revolution, but I'm willing to bet, in a few decades time, we'll be able to look back on the march of scientific progress and see a huge boost in research productivity when our ability to distribute and search through existing research started to catch up to the pace of its production.