
Caltech Announces Open Access Policy - kercker
http://www.caltech.edu/content/caltech-announces-open-access-policy
======
coffeemug

      The decision of our faculty to make their papers freely
      accessible online will ensure that the global community of
      researchers, students, and casual followers of science and
      engineering will learn about our work at earlier stages, enabling
      them to put it to use for the benefit of society.
    

I _love_ how they mention "casual followers of science". To me this is a huge
deal. I'm not a member of academia, but I really enjoy reading papers from a
wide variety of fields (in the spirit of "learn everything about something and
something about everything"). I never intend to stop, and I know lots of
"laymen" who do the same.

The unavailability of papers, lack of centralized tools, and terrible search
interfaces have been incredibly frustrating. I can't wait for a day when we
get a centralized, non-profit, publish/subscribe consumer service for all the
papers that ever get published by major research universities (with a good
search tool). The value of such a service to the public and society would be
_enormous_. As more and more people get educated and used to dealing with
science, this could be as big a deal as wikipedia.

We're not quite there yet, but this is a huge step by CalTech in the right
direction.

~~~
weland
> I love how they mention "casual followers of science"

Me too. This is quite beautiful. After I left academia, subscribing to all the
journals I used to have access to through my university became economically
unfeasible, for obvious reasons.

~~~
laichzeit0
My alma mater's library has a proxy that you can go through, as if you were
sitting right there in the library, and have access to any journal they
subscribe to. The trick being you have to be a current student, or alumni
student. Alumni membership per year is the equivalent of $40, you can take out
books from the library and use that proxy. You should see if your university
doesn't have something similar.

~~~
weland
This sounds like a great feature. I'm quite sure they don't have anything like
this.

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irollboozers
Congratulations Caltech on a great move! This will only have positive effects
for the future of scholarly publishing.

Best part:

>Faculty may still grant exclusive rights to their publishers, either
permanently or for an embargoed period, but to do so, they must request a
waiver from the open-access policy. At other institutions with open-access
policies, such as MIT and Harvard, faculty have requested waivers for about 5
percent of the total number of papers produced, usually to comply with the
requirement of a few publishers that want a formal waiver in order to even
consider manuscripts for publication.

5%, and in those cases, because of dinosaur publishers. This is a very
conclusive sign for the shift in mentality towards open access.

~~~
mjn
One nice thing about even having the waiver process, even if it's granted to
anyone who requests, is that it adds a slight bureaucratic roadblock that
causes some authors to rethink a publication choice they might not have
thought much about in the past. You go to publish with $big_journal, the
journal sees you're from a university with an open-access mandate and asks you
to get an open-access waiver before you can submit a manuscript, and in some
percentage of the cases this might cause you to just redirect your manuscript
elsewhere. In some cases that might be difficult; some sub-fields don't have
as many respected journals as others, or your paper might be something unusual
that's a perfect fit for a particular special issue and hard to publish
otherwise. But those end up being minority cases.

~~~
marvin
This is incidentally a textbook example of how the regulation of free markets
is supposed to work.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
This is a good thing in this case, but adding red-tape to intentionally alter
incentives is merely one useful tool in regulating markets, not a panacea, and
can easily be used, intentionally or not, to work against those aims e.g. _of
course you 're allowed to to use any supplier, just fill in these forms in
triplicate or use our preselected choice_.

------
impendia
> Indeed, some publishers, seeking to protect their own investment in
> scholarly work, have authorized third-party agencies to find articles posted
> in violation of their contractual rights and to issue Digital Millennium
> Copyright Act takedown notices that threaten legal action if articles are
> not removed from the web.

Wow! Really? I am a math professor, and in mathematics I have never heard of
this happening. It would strike me as professional suicide on the publishers'
behalf: holding a knife to the neck of their golden goose.

It seems that I was not alone in this perception:

[http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9958/why-do-
univ...](http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9958/why-do-universities-
tolerate-uploading-papers-on-their-websites/9968#9968)

Although I am in 100% in support of Caltech's policy, I would have guessed
that the issue was mostly theoretical and that they were only taking a stand
on principle. Either Caltech is bluffing, or I stand corrected. I'm not sure
which. But in either case, kudos to them.

~~~
cscheid
Elsevier has been targeting academia.edu lately. HN discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6882290](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6882290)

------
xvedejas
I'm a student (and researcher) at Caltech — and very excited to hear about
this. I hope Caltech continues to push for open access. I know that many
undergraduates would like to have course lectures posted freely online like
MIT's open courseware.

I do wonder, how common is such a policy at other institutions? I assume this
must be uncommon, since it's apparently newsworthy?

~~~
bello
Unfortunately, few Caltech classes have lectures that are actually worth it to
be posted online (unlike the MIT ones, who are IMO far superior in teaching
quality, for the most part)

~~~
WalterBright
I attended Caltech about 35 years ago. I kept my notes, but looking at them
now without recalling the context of the lectures makes them a bit on the
incomprehensible side.

I sure wish those lectures had been recorded and I could refresh my memory on
the more interesting ones.

I've also seen some of the MIT online videos, and my recollection is the
Caltech lectures I attended were of comparable quality.

------
001sky
_At other institutions with open-access policies, such as MIT and Harvard,
faculty have requested waivers for about 5 percent of the total number of
papers produced, usually to comply with the requirement of a few publishers
that want a formal waiver <in order to even consider manuscripts> for
publication._

This is the one caveat. It would be great to out these journals. Seems likely
is public/501c money going into the research on these, too.

------
robertwalsh0
It looks like we'll be able to access the MS-Word looking version for free.
For the "styled/typeset" two-column version it looks like people will have to
pay for the paywalled version.

At this point I'm left wondering:

1\. Is the typeset version that much of a value add? Do people not realize how
relatively easy it is to do these things on apart from publishing houses?

2\. Is reading a single column version all that bad? We do it on the internet
every day.

------
bladedtoys
Absolutely excellent, kudos!

I only wish Aaron Swartz had lived to see it.

~~~
niamh
Good point! Hopefully this paves the way for a movement among other
universities. I don't know of any similar initiatives in Ireland.

------
kjdfgkjsg
While I'm sure it had worthwhile content, their header was so distracting that
I never read what it had to say.

