
Should scientific articles be available free online? - zoowar
http://www.slate.com/?id=2111023&
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p4bl0
Yes. A thousand times yes.

As a student I'm really pissed of each time I found an article which looks
interesting and Springer tells me "pay me 35€ if you want to read this article
that researchers have written and some others reviewed but only us get money
because you know, we can."

New journals with open access initiative are really a good thing, but we also
need to have access to old articles which are currently locked by
multinationals which didn't do the work nor paid for it.

We don't need them anymore. They were useful when they were needed to have
access in university and labs library to research from across the world. Now
internet does that better than they could ever do it, and for a way less
expensive price.

I'm willing to pay something like 30€/year to have unlimited access to all
papers in a field. There could even be a limit to the number of authorized
downloads (who can seriously read more than 100 papers per year anyway?
(that's two per week, almost each week.)). But no DRM. And I say this but I
really think that this should be in total open access for everyone, I'm just
trying to moderate my words (and give them a less sudden death, I'm so kind!).

SpringerLink and co. need to change the way they distribute content. Or we'll
have to kill them.

« Your failed business model is not my problem. »

~~~
ma2rten
Maybe it's only my field of research, but I'd say that scientific articles ARE
essentially free. If I search for an articles on Google Scholar in 95% of the
cases there is a link next it that says "download pdf". When that is not the
case, I simply log in my university VPN and can download it anyway (at least
from my point of view). I've never paid for a scientific article in my life.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_I simply log in my university VPN..._

So in your country does everybody get a taxpayer-sponsored university VPN for
life? Or are you speaking from the highly privileged position of "current
university student in a well-funded school?"

In any case, it shows a tremendous impoverishment of imagination to claim that
Google Scholar is equivalent to an actual free market in research. I want the
footnotes in publication A to be _directly hyperlinked to the relevant
sections_ of their associated references. Otherwise we remain in the position
where random TV shows on Wikipedia have better public documentation than our
taxpayer-funded research.

I'll put your 95% assertion to the test and report back.

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mechanical_fish
Paper #1: field: applied physics

Appl. Phys. Lett. 76, 1095 (2000)

Result: no free link on Scholar. I can buy a copy for $29, or there's a new
service called "Deepdyve" that will "rent" me a 24-hour glimpse at the paper
for $2, no printing allowed.

Papers 2 to 20ish: works by the late Judah Folkman, field: cancer research

Here we have better luck; maybe 50% of the (very well-known) works on the
first two pages of this search have free PDFs:

[http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=J+folkman&...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=J+folkman&btnG=Search&as_sdt=0%2C48&as_ylo=&as_vis=0)

Still not feeling the 95%, though. Of course, I may not have worked in the
right fields. This is a big reason why I switched to software, after all.

~~~
Vivtek
Well, physics is an exception. The preprints at arxiv.org are free and contain
essentially everything.

Medicine, though - that's a problem.

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ChristianMarks
As a researcher myself, I completely agree that taxpayers should not be
subsidizing for-profit publishers. The government is wrong to fund the
production of research papers with taxpayer money and allow the owner of some
privately owned pay wall to collect a toll for access to them. Great work if
you can get it.

It is outrageous. Whenever the public invests in something, the public should
get a return if there is one. Suppose I made you the following offer. You can
invest in my company by purchasing stock. If my company succeeds, your return
on your investment will be the opportunity to purchase whatever I produce as a
consumer.

Question: if you took me up on my offer, what would that make you?

Answer: a taxpayer.

That's the position of the public with respect to access to scientific
research published with for-profit publishers. The publisher is assigned the
copyright, and collects their toll.

There is no earthly reason the taxpayer should be subsidizing for-profit
scientific publishers. I routinely refuse to review articles for publication
in for-profit journals. A number of my colleagues have been doing this for
years, and we're all over the political spectrum.

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ChuckFrank
Yes. Absolutely.

Once it was about access. If you had the keys to the Library, then you
controlled the information.

Now it's about distribution. If you want to examine your idea in public, you
can compare it anywhere, anytime to work that preceded yours.

Appropriate resource allocation can only be improved by increased
informational availability and transparency.

All these are part of the most basic tenets of Capitalism. Perfect Choice, and
Perfect Information. Improve one or the other will continue to have untold
benefits.

So in short. TLDR -- Yes. Absolutely.

~~~
younewman
What an enormous wank.

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rjurney
It is insane for the people to fund research they can't freely view the
results of.

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czDev
I work for PLoS, it's great to see Open Access become such a high profile
subject after the aaronsw story

~~~
ak217
Out of curiosity, what do you do for PLoS?

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PaulHoule
No question about it.

If taxpayers pay $50k-$100k to scientists to write a paper, the least the
government can do is spend another $5-50 to make it available for free
perpetually.

~~~
rflrob
Both of your estimates actually seem fairly low.

In biology, a single PhD student typically costs on the order of $50k/year in
terms of stipend and tuition support, and will typically be an author on fewer
papers than the number of years they are in grad school, so I would guess the
personnel costs alone are in the $100k range, with materials and reagents
potentially being a similar amount.

The publication costs in PLoS journals are 20-50 times higher than your high
end[1].

All that aside, I absolutely agree that the costs to society of not doing open
access are much greater than the costs of doing it.

[1]<http://www.plos.org/journals/pubfees.php>

~~~
sorbus
> The publication costs in PLoS journals are 20-50 times higher than your high
> end[1].

I would think that the cost of actually making it available (no vetting, just
throwing it online) is probably much lower than the cost of publication[1].
Note that, from your link, the expenses in the price include "peer review, of
journal production, and of online hosting and archiving".

[1] If it really does cost them even 50% of the prices they're charging to put
a single paper online, then either most of it is being eaten up in bureaucracy
or they're investing it and using the interest to pay for the hosting (which
would make a lot of sense, actually).

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derrickpetzold
They should be if they are payed for by public funds the same applies to
software. Of course that doesn't apply to defense or otherwise potentially
dangerous software but the general rule should be to opensource government
contracted development because if they don't have a good reason for not doing
so they are probably doing it wrong.

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dochtman
So what has become of that effort? We're 7 years in now, did they actually go
ahead with their plan?

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jessriedel
Yes, although the time delay between publication and public availability was
increased to 12 month.

<http://publicaccess.nih.gov/>

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cabalamat
Should the results of taxpayer-funded research be available to those who paid
for it, without further payment? Of course they should.

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rheide
Off-topic but boo on slate for detecting that I'm browsing on an iPad, after
which they redirect me to an 'iPad-optimized' front page, but not to the
article I wanted to read..

~~~
rawsyntax
A lot of the time the full website and the mobile site are not the same
backend / system. That said I share your frustration

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RK
Article from 2004.

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bauchidgw
sadly slate.com is not readable on the ipad due to some swipe/touch/die
scumware.....

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ristretto
It's not mostly about the price (you can always find a paper from friends etc
if you're determined). It's about the availability of vast amounts of text to
analysis and mining. Who knows how many new insights we have already lost
(mainly in the life sciences) from this absurd system that everyone seems to
hate yet nobody is willing to change.

btw, frontiers (<http://frontiersin.org/>) is another great open access set of
journals

