
Researchers Band Together To Force Science Journals To Open Access - olalonde
http://singularityhub.com/2012/03/18/8200-strong-researchers-band-together-to-force-science-journals-to-open-access/
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ma2rten
This might as well be the only social/economical problem, which manages to
make me angry. Not, because of the money wasted, which was supposed to go to
education and research. Governments have invented all kinds of worse ways to
blow money. Not, because of my believe that access to science is supposed to
be free and open to everyone. There are more essential things like human
rights and access to clean drinking water, which should be universal, but
still they are not.

What makes me angry about it, is that it is such an unnecessary problem. It is
just such a bad instance of the tragedy of the commons. Everyone recognizes
what a bad situation it is, but no one feels they are in the position to do
something about it.

Imagine the top 100 universities in the world, or even just the Ivory League,
sat together and signed an agreement, that they would prohibit their staff to
publish in non-free journals and that they would stop subscribing to them. I
think this problem would sort itself out instantly. Same thing if the funding
agencies of the EU and US would sit together.

Anyway, it seems like finally something happening about it, which is great.

~~~
anon_tpb
Looking backwards, rather than forwards, the people best placed to do
something about what has already happened are "The Pirate Bay". Surely it
couldn't be too hard to obtain copies of all the papers to date and put them
online?

Another option might be for researchers to post screenshots of every paper
read to Freenet. Over time, the collection would build into something useful.

Does software exist to strip stenography and DRM out of documents? Maybe
reduce it to ASCII or TeX, then do a brand new reformat?

~~~
slowpoke
Something related happened a few months ago. A heap of old papers which have
long since entered the public domain, but where locked behind paywalls, were
leaked. There's a statement accompanying the torrent[1], speaking up against
the outrage that is the academic publishing system. It's still quite well
seeded, me being among the people who spare bandwidth for it.

[1]:
[https://thepiratebay.se/torrent/6554331/Papers_from_Philosop...](https://thepiratebay.se/torrent/6554331/Papers_from_Philosophical_Transactions_of_the_Royal_Society__fro)

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mukaiji
As a hard-science researcher, I've long thought that scientists should fight
for the right to publish their findings (report, data...etc) to an open source
github-like service, in addition to the scientific publications they already
submit their work to.

By open-sourcing knowledge, humanity benefits. However, publishers prestige
currently has everyone locked in a vicious cycle of publishing under-any-
circumstance for the sake of career recognition. Is that really the end goal
of scientific discovery?

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shiven
The online pledge is at: <http://thecostofknowledge.com/>

Please do sign if you are in any way connected with academia/academic
publishing. Your fellow researchers thank you.

~~~
edtechdev
They need to add an education category. There is actually research on
education, believe it or not. Here's my signing note:

I do educational research and development, and the lack of open access to
research on effective teaching and learning techniques has had far reaching
and negative consequences. See for example the book Academically Adrift on how
ineffective current college teaching practices are. I currently work at a
predominantly engineering school, and faculty don't even have access to most
educational and psychological research journals because of the high costs.
Think also of the thousands of K-12 teachers - none of whom have any access to
most educational research. Imagine if doctors had no access to research, and
that's what the practice of education has become.

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ak217
Here are some thoughts that came up during a private conversation about
Elsevier a few weeks ago...

The question is, why is open access publishing so expensive in many journals?
From what I understand, it's because of the need to pay the technical staff
(technical editors, sysadmins, etc.) - costs that in traditional publishing
are paid by your library (i.e. spread out as a tax across all faculty's grant
overheads+taxpayer money). These costs can be driven down by consolidating the
journal publishing platforms (i.e. providing a service for people to organize
their own journals and a market for technical editors to provide their
services to the content editors).

And critically, there needs to be a way to incentivize authors to drive down
the total cost of publishing. A big part of the reason big old publishers
continue to exist now is that there is an open loop in the incentives: the
authors don't bear the costs that they incur to the universities, and there is
no direct feedback from the audience that is shut out by this cost. If authors
are given an idea of what it really costs to read their article, and the
breakdown of who bears that cost, the journals will have to compete on that
total cost.

But this will not be very effective until university libraries start breaking
down the cost of subscriptions to individual users. So one way to approach
this is by providing university libraries with a system to estimate the
individual cost of each article view (i.e. crudely, if a subscription costs X
and Y users view Z articles, then each user will have incurred some cost that
is X/Y on average). Then start discussing what to do about who carries the
cost burden from the users who are outliers on top. This is the first step
toward closing the incentives loop.

I agree that there are too many journals, but unfortunately there will need to
be even more before the ones with the right combinations of cost and editorial
structure will win out. Going back to the common platform for publishing and
editorial services that I mentioned: the real kicker will come when the
platform is integrated with a social network (where nodes can be organizations
as well as people). In other words, once you provide an easy and trusted way
for editors to write down their web of trust, display that web to others, and
act based on it, you will have put online the informal web of trust
(reputation) that underlies publishing. This opens really powerful
possibilities.

In the meantime, traditional publishers are holding on for dear life and using
increasingly desperate tactics (like buying legislation, in Elsevier's case)
to hold on to their money funnel. This is holding back science by artificially
restricting access to publicly funded research. (And don't get me started on
the textbook business... although good things are coming to that because Apple
will disrupt it from the bottom.)

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z0ot
If this is successful it would be one of the best things to happen to science
in decades. It is ridiculous that open scientific collaboration is hindered by
paywalls.

~~~
rflrob
The sad fact of the matter is that it probably wouldn't affect scientific
collaboration. A large fraction of scientific research is done at universities
that generally have subscriptions to these journals (albeit at a relatively
large price).

What's more appalling is that you[1], as the taxpayer who funded this research
can't see the results. And don't let the companies that oppose the FRPAA flim-
flam you: the published papers are the real results of the research, not the
progress reports that get filed with the funding agencies. I'm not going to
deny that journals add some value, but how much they add and whether
subscriptions and one-off $40/article fees are the best way to recoup those
values is something about which I'm deeply skeptical.

[1] I'm a grad student at one of those aforementioned universities. It's a
hassle for me when I'm not on campus, but not impossible

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jostmey
These journals have nothing to do with the scientific discoveries that they
publish. But they seem keen on trying to take a large slice of the pie.

Scientific discoveries must and should be open to the public. After all, it is
the public that funds these studies.

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stfu
I still have problems with this idea. The all-funded-research-should-be-free
thing is a problematic perspective to hang on to. One could argue, that
consequently everyone working in Academia should be obliged to give away the
books they write, the documents they provide, the presentations, the exams -
for free because over here Universities are funded by taxpayer money.
Enforcing this would most likely have an adverse effect, i.e. departments
trying to get private funding in order to avoid disclosure.

in regards to the Journals it comes all down to the rankings. So far I did not
find a single ranking were Open Access journals were performing well. Might be
more of a soft sciences problem, but I can not see a reasonable motive why
someone should publish in an open access journal if they research holds up to
the standards of well ranked "closed" journal.

The only aspect could see is "to take a stand", and at least on my list of
things I am willing to stand up for, the budgeting of the library department
is relatively low on priority.

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xenophanes
"force"?

noun: "coercion or compulsion, esp. with the use or threat of violence"

They are _not_ using force. If they did it'd be awful. But because they are
doing this peacefully, with no force, it's good.

Making a free, voluntary choice a trade or contract -- whether to accept or to
decline -- _is the epitome of not using force_.

Not using any force is one of the things that makes them legitimate. They
should emphasize that instead of talking about it in terms like, "But the
fight for open access is just getting started."

It's not a fight. Don't pretend you're fighting, that just makes you look bad.
Especially when you aren't even fighting! Don't use metaphor to make your side
look worse.

~~~
jostmey
Have you ever worked in a research lab? Then you would know jut how essential
it is to have access to the originals studies and prior work. Scientific
research cannot be done without access to the scientific literature.

These journal companies are charging Universities millions of dollars
annually. And when I say millions annually, they charge each and every
separate University library millions of dollars. Yet, all these companies do
is host a few hundred thousand PDF documents. I could do that for a about a
hundred dollars a year on Dreamhost.

The journal companies essentially have a monopoly on the market. They must and
should be broken up for the good of scientific research. The studies were
funded by the public, and should be accessible to the public.

~~~
rflrob
> The journal companies essentially have a monopoly on the market. They must
> and should be broken up for the good of scientific research. The studies
> were funded by the public, and should be accessible to the public.

The problem is that almost by definition, they have a monopoly on "the
market", since each paper is unique and non-fungible, and therefore arguably a
separate market. A university can't decide not to subscribe to Cell, for
example, and instead get the same research from other journals. This is a good
thing (since it means research effort isn't being duplicated), but it means
you can't just "break up" a publisher to bring pricing in line with a
competitive market.

~~~
jostmey
What I find utterly dumbfounding is how some of the journals get away with
charging everyone money. First, the journals charge the labs publishing fees.
Then, the journals turn around and charge the Universities access fees. It is
sheer lunacy.

I wish the NIH or NSF would require that all published studies from their
grants be placed in the public domain.

~~~
tingletech
I think NIH does, it is called pub med central. (well, this is not technically
public domain; but rather open access)

