
Making It Easier to Break Science Journal Paywalls - stablemap
https://www.wired.com/story/its-gonna-get-a-lot-easier-to-break-science-journal-paywalls/
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forapurpose
A friend was working on an amateur history project and I was helping them with
the database. I figured that I'd start with the standards among professional
historians for databases - people, place and event metadata; fields; schema,
etc. That way my friend's work eventually could find a much broader audience,
both among contemporaries and across time; there would be a much broader set
of tools my friend could use (likely even existing FOSS databases); and of
course I wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel.

I asked a few professional academic historians - and to my shock they said no
such thing existed. They seemed to think I was confused about the need and
accepted that everything was done ad hoc as it always had been. One suggested
adapting a proprietary online genealogy database to the needs of the project
(which was not genealogy nor even particularly focused on people).

It was depressing, thinking of the massive missed opportunity across academia
to share and utilize their data much more efficiently. Imagine the state of
software development if developers managed their work product the same way, in
ad hoc hacked together silos on their personal computers, rather than through
Github and the Internet

That was a few years ago, so I hope things have changed.

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betterunix2
Frankly, scientific journal publishing is obsolete. The only reason we needed
journal publishers in the first place was to distribute the knowledge more
widely -- when copying articles required industrial equipment. Now we have the
Internet and journals are only sticking around because of their name
recognition.

At least in some fields, progress has been made on rendering journal
publishers a thing of the past:

[https://eprint.iacr.org/](https://eprint.iacr.org/)

~~~
tstactplsignore
I strongly disagree, and I think the disagreement probably is because we're in
two different fields (biology vs CS). I think journals should be open access
and non-profit. However, I also think they exist, and they should be tiered.
This is how scientists indirectly communicate the importance of a work to the
public and to the news media.

A lay-person can quickly grasp that a Nature or eLife or PLoS Biology paper is
considered more trustworthy by the scientific community than a random blog
post. It's a system that is far from perfect, but it does have predictive
power for determining what the scientific community thinks of a work without
having to be an expert. This is arguably the single most important utility in
science communication, where it is essential that the scientific community is
able to communicate updates on issues like climate, GMOs, vaccines, genetics,
conservation biology, and evolutionary biology. These are all extremely
important issues on which in some ways scientists are already losing the
communication battle. If communicating science loses its journal hierarchy,
loses pre-publication peer review, all of the pseudoscientists and charlatans
and extremist think-tanks will jump on the chance to spew out paper after
paper to confuse the public, and confuse journalists. They will engage 24-7 in
"debate" about these papers on twitter and blogs, and probably win against
scientists because pseudoscientists have more time, resources, and experience
convicing people. Some scientists seem to think this is a silly hypothetical,
and can't imagine that Ted Cruz could ever write something that looks like a
scientific paper. Nothing is further from the truth. I encourage you to look
up Answers In Genesis "research journal", a creationist website, and see if a
lay-person could quickly distinguish any of those papers from real science
(they can't). Climate denialists write equally long and convicing articles on
blogs like Climate Audit and Watts Up With That. It takes high levels of
domain expertise to debunk these works, or to understand why they're wrong. A
world without a hierarchy of journals with pre-publication peer review is a
world in which 99.9% of people become unable to determine high-quality
pseudoscience from science. We should be making these systems stronger, by
improving peer review within the scientific community, by establishing a more
rigid and formal hierarchy of publications, not by encouraging communication
anarchy. Because we will lose communication battles to pseudoscientists
without journals.

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matwood
The problem is that locking good research behind paywalls certainly does not
help win the communication battle. Schools and grant givers need to stop
relying on publishing in a prestigious journal as a criteria for being a good
researcher.

I agree that proper, rigorous science needs to be marked as such, but the
closed journals are part of the problem and not the solution.

~~~
Someone
tstactplsignore wrote _”I think journals should be open access and non-
profit.”_

=> (s)he isn’t arguing the paywalls should stay, but that we shouldn’t throw
away the quality stamp that journals offer with the paywalls.

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itchyjunk
Someone was telling me (I haven't verified it) that the costs of access is
charged to students per semester. A trivial (or non trivial for someone cheap
like me) of $40 a semester. Now, I asked about a dozen people how often they
access this resource at the library and none of them had used it. One lecturer
enlightened me that some class encourages students to use it but students
prefer to not read dense research paper and would rather read articles about
the topic and cite the paper.

I don't know if colleges SHOULD pay high yearly subscription is the usage is
low. But then, people who DO use it are left high and dry. Multiple colleges
share books, too bad they can't do the same with these.

I don't have the numbers but I wonder what a college is charged and how many
full ride scholarships a college would be able to give out with that fee?

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bocklund
> Someone was telling me (I haven't verified it) that the costs of access is
> charged to students per semester.

I have not heard of this in the US. It's probably indirect through students ->
tuition -> libraries -> subscriptions.

On low usage: it seems like you might be talking about undergraduates. Journal
articles are primarily read (and generated) by faculty, post docs and graduate
students. Considering that research grants bring in a lot of money to the
university, I don't think it's so simple to consider scholarships that could
be given with journal subscription money.

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LeoJiWoo
Its a miscarriage of science and justice, when publicly funded science goes
behind a journal paywall.

People should be able to access what their taxes funded, and increase
communication around science.

I really agree with this quote from the article.

“Access to science is going to be a first-world privilege,” Geltner says.
“That’s the opposite of what science is supposed to be about.”

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zmk_
In the Netherlands, at least, it will not be allowed for researchers to
publish articles in journals that erect paywalls.

~~~
Derbasti
I think this was made a European rule: publicly funded research must be made
available to the public (without paywalls).

There is currently a huge kerfuffle going on in Germany, with most
universities canceling their Elsevier subscription because Elsevier doesn't do
true open access.

As a scientist, I can only thank goodness for Sci Hub. It is so insulting to
go through a grueling review, be expected to do reviews myself for free, then
pay thousands of dollars for publishing a pdf, and then pay additional
thousands of dollars for accessing my peers works. What a mess.

~~~
Yetanfou
Even those who have licensed access to journals thank goodness for Sci-Hub, at
least I do. It is often much easier to feed Sci-Hub a DOI and get the paper
after negotiating a simple CAPTCHA than it is to log in through some portal so
a cookie gets set which tells Wiley that this user has access to these, but
not those journals today (but maybe tomorrow, or not), use their search
feature to find the correct volume and then finally find the link which
hopefully shows an open lock.

In this it is comparable to those copy protection schemes of old which made
paying users jump through hoops while the pirates just had smooth sailing all
the way. Arrrrrr!

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posterboy
The DOI should take you directly to the article-page. Sci-Hub works through
that mechanism.

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anotheryou
TL;DR differential to sci-hub?

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mlinksva
Nope, the article claims sci-hub is "falling to lawsuits", which seems a bogus
statement -- to be determined.

Article fails to justify its title. Seems they got an interview with one of
the Google Scholar founders, tacked on some random stuff related to scholarly
publishing and search, and slapped an unsupported headline on it.

(I'm all for breaking science journal paywalls!)

