
China backs bold plan to tear down journal paywalls - Vinnl
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07659-5
======
paraditedc
It's interesting to see China aligning EU with on issues like this in the
context of US-China war of words.

Somewhat related, I remember watching Japanese animes where the the world is
divided to imaginary nations that resembles US (big Western super power),
China (big Eastern super power) and EU (group of countries combined to form a
substantial power).

In these animes, nations form alliances but turn against each other the moment
their interests are no longer aligned.

I am starting to see how this is also true in real world.

~~~
_Nat_
Is there any evidence that this is connected to other political issues?

I mean, the open-access movement is widely hailed as an important progressive
step in improving the academic world, regardless of nationality. Hopefully
it's just a matter of time before the US's own agencies join in similar
demands, assuming that there isn't already such a plan.

~~~
paraditedc
> Is there any evidence that this is connected to other political issues?

No, there isn't in this specific instance.

However, reading news for the past year did give me a overall feeling that
ties between China and EU are getting closer while ties between China and US,
as well as EU and US are getting more strained.

~~~
joejerryronnie
It’s interesting because, on the surface, it appears that China is exerting
more control over its population while the EU seems to be giving back control
to its population. But reading between the lines, the EU is actually moving
toward more political control over its member countries, just like China but
in a more progressively palatable format.

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mac01021
[PREMISE:]

These scientific journals hail from a time before the web was widespread and
universally accessible.

In the present day, it is technologically feasible for every scientist to
self-publish on their own blog (we'd probably want some new tooling for
tracking and counting citations distributed across the web, but that's just
details for some programmers to work out).

[QUESTION:]

Given the premise, I wonder the following. If we were to simply disband the
existing publishers today, rather than trying to regulate them, what system
would emerge to fill their place? Would it be similar to the existing system?
Or would it be something more free-and-webby as described in the premise? Or
something else entirely?

~~~
matheusmoreira
In my understanding, the most valuable service academic journals provide is
peer review. If reviewers start accepting online submissions, people could
simply send them links to their online articles hosted on their site or blog.
Content would be licensed under the CC-BY-SA. If it passes peer review, the
journal would simply link to it and also provide a PDF copy. Journals would
become a directory of peer reviewed works.

~~~
Vinnl
The most valuable (or at least: the reason we're still paying them) service
academic journals provide is being able to categorise academics as having
published in those journals. There are plenty of journals that provide
perfectly fine peer review, but that are not as important as other journals
because they don't have their brand name.

In other words: for many disciplines, the potential replacements providing
peer review, archival and distribution are already there. The main thing a
replacement system will have to find out is how to determine who to give
grants, tenure, etc.

(Disclaimer: I'm working on a project that hopes to achieve that.)

~~~
Ninjaneered
Any chance you can post a link to what you are working on? Does it involve a
PageRank like system?

~~~
Vinnl
It's in my profile, the link is [https://plaudit.pub](https://plaudit.pub)

It's not currently that interesting to the average HN reader though. The idea
is to allow researchers to give each other recognition explicitly, ideally
replacing the recognition of "being published in journal x". Since researchers
already have a reputation in their academic community, we figured that we
could leverage that as a counterweight to the indirect reputation that
journals currently have.

We do so by integrating with preprint servers and publishers, providing a
widget that allows researchers to endorse the research they're reading. The
first integrations are set to launch at the start of 2019, so until then
there's not much to play with.

That said, the PageRank-like system you might be looking for could just be the
h-index?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index)

~~~
Ninjaneered
Good stuff, thanks for the h-index link, I'll take a look. I've seen something
similar, SCImago Journal Rank, but I think that is only for the journal, not
the individual. I really like the idea of moving away from the idea of a
journal brand as the ranking of importance.

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AlexCoventry
This is good for legitimizing Open Access as a principle, but as a practical
matter, it seems like sci-hub has solved the problem, at least for now.

~~~
cultus
The fact that it is illegal makes it a problem to use for many people I know,
especially in government. That in the TLD changes like every week.

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jancsika
There's no loophole in Plan S that would prohibit redistribution of unmodified
copies, is there?

These articles keep referring to the ability to "immediately read." Sounds
great but I wanted to make sure there's nothing up the term's sleeve that I'm
missing.

~~~
Vinnl
> Authors retain copyright of their publication with no restrictions. All
> publications must be published under an open license, preferably the
> Creative Commons Attribution Licence CC BY.

[https://www.scienceeurope.org/wp-
content/uploads/2018/09/Pla...](https://www.scienceeurope.org/wp-
content/uploads/2018/09/Plan_S.pdf)

------
Ninjaneered
What would be a components of an "ideal" solution? I'd love to hear
improvements or corrections to my assumptions.

1) Free to view all approved papers (possibly run by a non-profit and funded
by grants around the world)

2) Establish reputations for scientists (giving scientists access to future
grants)

3) Peer review handled autonomously (submitted papers are automatically
distributed autonomously by the system to other scientists in the related
field with a high enough reputation)

4) Easy searching for articles (articles have semantic structure, are
categorized by author, title, subject, citations, etc.)

5) Removal of "scientific silos" (all articles published to the same site,
categories define content rather than publishing brand)

~~~
Vinnl
1) There already exist many platforms where one can freely view peer reviewed
papers. The main problem is that only a small section of researchers submit
their work there.

2) This, I think, is the crux. We should move away from using journal names as
a proxy for quality (which, luckily, is an explicit goal of Plan S), and find
an alternative. Altmetrics is an example of a company that attempts to
establish one such alternative, I'm part of a project that attempts another.

3) This would be nice, but I don't think that's be necessary for making them
open access? Given how conservative much of academia appears to be, I'm not
sure if this would actually make a transition more likely.

4) Metadata for research is often already really good, also for Open Access
research. Finding the actual article itself usually is the main challenge, but
the only reason for that is because those articles can be behind a paywall.
With them freely available, discovery is practically solved.

5) This too should be fixed if all research is published under an open license
such as CC-By, which would allow everybody to mirror articles. (Like this
project does: [https://oalibrary.org/](https://oalibrary.org/))

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gnicholas
When policies that require scientists to publish in journals that either give
open access or permit simultaneous open publication, does it affect
previously-published works?

That is, will this mean that more new research will be freely available, but
that old research will still be behind paywalls? If so, it would be
interesting if researchers could push journals to not only allow open access
for their new work, but also require that previous papers also be made
available.

~~~
Vinnl
No, it doesn't. Making previously published work available would still be an
open problem - although of course, the pressure to fix that is lower as long
as Sci-Hub exists.

(Also, often subscriptions by university libraries to include the provision
that they maintain access to already-published work, so together with inter-
library loan, it's not _that_ much of a problem.)

------
xvilka
Making a good search facilities like Sci-Hub or even steps further is also
very important. Not only paywalling is a problem - even if you have a
subscription number of clicks to reach the article is usually more than one,
not to speak about awful, unintuitive interfaces depending on
publisher/journal.

~~~
Bartweiss
It's striking how many academics admit (usually anonymously, online) to using
Sci-Hub for content they _do_ have legitimate access to. Sci-Hub appears to be
pretty much flawless at looking up articles across all publishers by ID or
even title, and quickly returning the right thing if it's available.

The systems provided by publishers are, um, _not_. They're at the usual
quality of bad corporate software, but more strikingly their anti-piracy
changes have only served to make the gap worse. There are anti-crawler
features which freeze access to entire universities when a hidden link is
followed. There are view-in-app and download-disabled restrictions, often
associated with no-searchable-text. (Which are _especially_ idiotic, of
course, because you can't actually restrict access to static content once you
serve it. Using screenshots and OCR is irritating, but not hard to apply.) And
in the worst cases, there's "available on request" via a library or some other
human-interaction delivery mechanism. Which actually would limit bulk piracy,
but only by crippling access altogether.

Every time I've tried to get a background in a topic or write about it,
there's been a step where I check a dozen papers and discard 80% of them as
being irrelevant for my purpose (or simply bad). Assuming that's common, it's
hard to imagine how silos with custom access mechanisms can endure against a
single, searchable repository at any price.

~~~
cultus
>It's striking how many academics admit (usually anonymously, online) to using
Sci-Hub for content they do have legitimate access to. Sci-Hub appears to be
pretty much flawless at looking up articles across all publishers by ID or
even title, and quickly returning the right thing if it's available.

It's funny how absolutely useless Google scholar is for finding papers. You
can specifically put in authors and the exact title in quotes and it will
still be on like the third page.

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nicodjimenez
No need for a paywall when you have a firewall

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thro_a_way
What about tearing down some other walls...

