
Ask HN: Why aren't scientific journals free on the web? - clyfe
Asking $ for them seems contrary to their purpose doesn't it?<p>And post links if you know any freebies as in:<p>http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/<p>http://www.springer.com/computer/reading+room+welcome<p>http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl
======
forkandwait
In physics and math, a lot of the the intellectual/ academic "action" (a
combination of the sharing of results + acclamation by peers (for tenure and
promotion)) has moved to preprint servers, specifically <http://arxiv.org>.
Instead of the closed peer review process, what happens is that your
scientific peers either start citing you publically or they rip you to shreds
publically -- just as good for judging a result as three anonymous (and
usually old and set in their ways) reviewers.

This move really pisses off the big publishing houses/ copyright owners like
Wiley, but whenever they blather about anonymous peer review what they are
really saying is "we make a lot of money off this process -- don't take it
away".

The problem with systems like arxiv -- and the reason why all academics don't
go there in droves -- is that acedemia promotes people and the govt gives
grants based on a formula: sum(journal_prestige .* number_articles). Take away
the current system and there is no way to evaluate anybody.

What about via their intellectual merit, you ask? You can prove things in the
experimental sciences and math, but in the humanities and the social
"sciences" (ack!), there is no objective criteria for evaluating whether a
potential hire is either "good" or "not so good" except the above formula.
What makes it worse, is that in the social sciences, nobody ever reads papers
unless their advisor or one of their advisor's friends wrote it, so if you are
on a hiring committee outside your field, you don't know shit about most
potential hires (except sum(prestige .* count))

As for the cost -- the internet makes it basically free -- all you have to do
is host a bunch of pdf's and have a search function. Fairly trivial for a
linux enabled programmer in a university. It is the sociology of it all that
prevents the move to open articles.

One of the contradictions, though, to the evaluation argument above is that
academics increase in value with each citation, so it hurts an academic to put
barriers in front of her papers. Academics almost NEVER make royalties, btw.

(The linked article makes many of the same points.)

A lot of hot academics just put pdf's of their articles on their personal
website anyway.

~~~
clp16
Suggesting that the cost of organizing, judging, critiquing, and hosting those
papers is basically free is not supported.
[http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/11/the-economic-
cas...](http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/11/the-economic-case-for-
open-access-in-academic-publishing.ars) This nice article by ars does quick
job of pulling together those costs. Also, just slapping a search engine on a
whole bunch of articles exists in Google Scholar, but that hasn't
revolutionized anything. It is nice that one can see where all the copies of
an article exist, but it is still missing je ne sais quoi.

~~~
forkandwait
I guess I was assuming that the product wouldn't be the same as old school
publishing, just free; rather I was assuming more like the articles published
on arxiv. In this latter case, the layout editing etc is absorbed with the
producer and their administrative staff at the university, with the hopes that
their article will have a big impact.

~~~
mhluongo
The problem is that arxiv-style publishing _cannot_ replace peer-reviewed work
in academia. Peer review isn't just something the big publishers are pushing-
it's an integral part of academia. Without reputation, a journal doesn't get
read- and reputation in academia necessitates peer review.

OTOH, layout is pretty replaceable. Publishers guard their layout guides
pretty seriously (lol!), but I'm not sure typesetting services are so
important now that most universities- even liberal arts unis- have at least
one resident LaTeX guru.

~~~
forkandwait
I disagree (respectfully).

I actually think traditional peer review (2-4 anonymous editors, generally
old-boys in their field) is really, really broken. Arxiv and the like
functions just fine without it because you get peer reviewed in the open by
everyone; if you matter, people subscribe to your papers and try to poke holes
in them or start citing them. Also, if you have a new theory that challenges
the old guard it won't make it into the journals; with open discussion, if you
can back up your crackpot theories with data and theorems they get accepted.
(Remember that the "ether" was an obvious truth in the late 1800's in physics;
this is a worse problem in the non-hard "sciences" like sociology.)

I think the "peer review" offered by traditional academic publishing process
sucks, and the sooner we get away from it the better. The old style peer
review USED to work in that it kept complete garbage out of the printed
journals that got sent around.

~~~
mhluongo
I heard a story the other day about a paper trying to make it into CHI, a big
conference in human-computer interaction. In CS and its subfields, conferences
like CHI tend to be more important than journals (or so I've heard). Anyway,
the paper was rejected by reviewers, and the rebuttal wasn't enough to make it
into the conference.

The paper was stellar, and the author knew it, so he persisted, reasoning that
the paper was just too far-reaching for his reviewers. He applied to a portion
of the conference called alt.chi, where highly externally reviewed papers can
be accepted into the conference, despite being turned down by the review
proper. He was able to garner 38 positive named reviews - a shoo-in - and was
entered into the conference.

On one hand, this is a great story about how the academic community can build
processes that correct for conservative or short-sighted peer review. OTO,
though, it's interesting to note that if he hadn't had 38 positive named
reviews (or some n less than 38, but considered very strong), he wouldn't have
been accepted. This is because, historically, named review is messed up- no
one would negatively review his paper and attach his or her name. I can't talk
too much about the details of arXiv, but I do know that in a named review
system, it's easy to both a) discourage negative commentary, and b) discourage
younger or less experienced reviewers, who are especially afraid of hurting
their reputation against more experienced colleagues.

Don't get me wrong- I do think that more open systems can replace the current
peer review- but I also believe that double-blind reviews and sometimes the
intervention of an editor are important for a coercion-free process. They also
make it easier to cut the information clutter- instead of following individual
researchers, I can follow a few peer-reviewed outlets I trust.

EDIT: I guess a big part of my point is that while it doesn't need to be
_traditional_ peer review, some of the aspects of traditional peer review
process need to be maintained in the community.

~~~
aufreak3
You make an important point, but public named negative reviews are common in
the field of writing fiction. Then apparently, the social setup that writers
live in is different from the academic setup where public negative reviews
_may_ have "political" consequences for your career.

Any comments on that? Is there something that the academic world can borrow
from the writers' world to remove the discouraging influences you mention? I
haven't thought through this since I don't know much about a writer's world.

------
mbreese
What you're looking for are called "Open Access" journals. There are a few
lists on the web, such as <http://www.doaj.org/> . There has been a big push
recently for Open Access to scientific data, especially NIH funded studies. I
don't know how this is for NSF funded work though. PLoS is the poster child of
this movement, but others have been around for longer, such as the BioMed
Central (BMC) family of journals.

There are a lot of costs involved in the process of producing a scientific
journal: printing, editing, hosting PDFs/supplemental data, etc... These are
not insignificant costs. Usually the costs of this are split between the
submitter and the subscriber (hence why sometimes articles include a
disclaimer that they are an advertisement). Open Access journals will force
these costs over to the submitter completely, leaving access to the articles
free.

~~~
forkandwait
Let's look at these costs a little bit, and whether they still apply with the
internet --

Printing: No need to have printed journals at all ever again. If a library
wants an archive they can do it on their local hp and bind it. Free.

Reviewing: Done by volunteers. Free.

Editing: Done in the reviewing process, plus journals don't "work with"
authors helping them to craft their paragraphs. There is an editor who might
say "this is unreadable, resubmit", but that's all. Free or darn close.

Creating PDF's or publishable documents: This now happens on the researchers
desk, and is basically free once you buy office software. There are plenty of
people in a university to prep an article to be really, really pretty if you
bother to print it out. Free.

Hosting PDF's and data: Universities have enough leftover computers and FTE's
that they can do this without charging an account. Free.

So what is the cost to an open journal? The fact that it is going to
inevitably do to the academic journal business what craigslist did to the
newspaper classified business....

Sorry, time marches on.

~~~
tzs
> Reviewing: Done by volunteers. Free

Hmmm...work on one's own research in order to generate a paper that can get
citations and advance one's career, or take time away from that to review
other people's papers for free.

~~~
notahacker
In most academic disciplines reading and critically analysing current research
on a particular topic is a fundamental part of generating research papers.

Even startup founders competing in the fast-moving world of business seem to
find time to read and give feedback on things that interest them. I don't
think a shortage of people willing to review papers is going to be a problem,
and if it is, it's a problem that could easily be solved by the prestigious
open access journals requiring those submitting papers to set aside time to
participate in the peer review process of others' papers

~~~
tzs
> In most academic disciplines reading and critically analysing current
> research on a particular topic is a fundamental part of generating research
> papers

Isn't that generally done by reading new papers that have been published AFTER
they have been reviewed?

> I don't think a shortage of people willing to review papers is going to be a
> problem, and if it is, it's a problem that could easily be solved by the
> prestigious open access journals requiring those submitting papers to set
> aside time to participate in the peer review process of others' papers.

I don't think that's a good solution, because I'd rather have the best
researchers doing research, rather than reviewing the papers of lesser
researchers.

What I think we need to do is recognize that researching and reviewing
research are not necessarily done by the best people. For instance there are
subjects where I probably could never become a researcher, because I just
don't for some reason come up with new ideas in those subjects, but I can
understand the new ideas others come up. Hence, I could potentially be a
decent reviewer in those subjects.

What could work would be a system where we have reviewer as a separate
profession. Researchers submit papers to reviewers who review them and give
feedback, and an overall rating which is digitally signed. When a paper is
published (by whatever means--open access journal, the researcher's blog,
whatever), the signed reviewer ratings can also be included.

Over time, reviewers would develop reputations with readers, and researchers
would hire high reputation reviewers to review their papers, allowing the good
reviewers to make reviewing their full time job.

When someone posts an unreviewed paper at arXiv.org, I'd expect that reviewers
who have not built up reputations would review it for free, and publish their
reviews. I'd expect sites would spring up specifically to host these reviews.
It would be through these sites that new reviewers would built up their
reputations to where researchers will start to pay them to get reviews.

------
pbh
A fairly detailed (if opinionated) answer to your question is here:

[http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2008/02/06/openacc...](http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2008/02/06/openaccess_is_t.html)

The summary is: (1) academics have historically given away their research and
reviewing work for free to (revenue seeking) journals and professional
associations to get distribution and prestige, (2) this no longer makes sense
with the Internet, and (3) academia, journals, and professional associations
are in an awkward transition as a result.

In the meantime, just use Google Scholar and hope that you are reading
something important enough that someone has possibly violated copyright and
posted a version online without a paywall.

~~~
clp16
Google Scholar isn't an answer to the free publications question.

~~~
pbh
Admittedly, the OP is not very clear. There could be at least three questions,
based on the headline, the body text question, and the example URLs cited:

(1) "Why are journals not open access?"

(2) "Where can I get free copies of academic articles?"

(3) "What open access journals/preprint servers exist?"

My response attempted to answer (1) and (2) with "most journals/conferences
are ultimately not interested in dissemination of research results to the
general public" and "Google Scholar, which generally has un-paywalled PDFs
from academic web pages," respectively. Other people answer (3) elsewhere in
this discussion, with answers like arXiv and PLoS.

If your point is that it is not yet clear economically how academic publishing
will work in the future, then, I agree.

------
gsivil
Physics and optics journals that you can read without any subscription:

arXiv.org An archive of e-prints maintained by the Cornell University Library.

Optics Express The open-access journal of the Optical Society of America

New Journal of Physics The open-access journal for physics.

Journal of the European Optical Society – Rapid Publications

At the same time there is a new trend in many journals nowadays to give to the
authors the options to pay so as to have their articles available free of
charge

------
RBerenguel
Their purpose is to make money: they are not there for the sake of helping
spread research (although it is an "useful byproduct").

~~~
bugsy
I am not sure that is true. If it is true, then they are committing tax fraud
since nearly every journal is published by a non-profit foundation or
organization.

~~~
mbreese
Non-profit doesn't mean free. Any money made from journals helps support their
core missions.

~~~
bugsy
I did not say that non-profit means free.

Please note that my comment regarding non-profit status is a response to the
claim that the _purpose_ of scientific journals "is to make money". If this
claim is true, that their purpose is in fact to make money, then they are
fraudulently representing themselves to tax authorities when they claim to be
non-profit organizations.

~~~
mbreese
I have no direct knowledge of the cost breakdown for organizations that
publish journals, but I could see how the journal could be the money maker for
the organization that then allowed them to perform other duties (lobbying,
education, etc... ).

My only point is that a print publication could still have the purpose of
being a "money maker" and the publisher still be a non-profit.

------
mhluongo
My understanding is that the problem with making scientific journals freely
available is usually one of reputation. Reputable journals need strong peer
review and editing, which isn't always free. Further, until a journal is
reputable, few people want to publish in it.

In the US, all works funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH) are
required to be made freely available to the public within one (?) year of
publication. Given, that's only valid for the field of medicine, but there's
been a push for all academic work funded bu the government to get similar
treatment.

Extremely relevant - Ars Technica wrote an article on moving to open-access a
few days ago. Open access is a movement in academia similar to open source in
software, and is becoming more popular in fields like math and computer
science.

[http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/11/the-economic-
cas...](http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/11/the-economic-case-for-
open-access-in-academic-publishing.ars)

~~~
mhluongo
For the products of funding by NIH, see PubMed -
<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/>

------
andrewf
A lot of the paywalls fade away if you access from a computer at a subscribing
institution such as a university library.

I live very close to a university whose libraries are open to the public.
Quite handy.

------
uberuberuber
I work for a medical association that publishes a top-100 journal (I work on
different products, not the journal), and we have ~20 full time staff members
internally working on it. Actual delivery of web content is handled by an
outside vendor with their own staff. Tack on the declining $ available from
advertising, plus ever more onerous pharma restrictions and there is no way
that the content could be delivered for free.

------
tokenadult
I'm surprised PLoS hasn't been mentioned in the thread yet.

<http://www.plos.org/>

------
zmanian
High cost of Scientific Journals is largely an artifact of how the journals of
various academic societies were digitized.

During the late 90's, the academic societies realized that making their
archives internet accessible would be very high value. But 90's era internet
economics meant that this would cost several hundred million dollars. But
during the late 90's stock market bubble, it was also possible to raise
several hundred million dollars.

As a condition for digitizing journal archives, the publishers acquired the
copyrights from the academic societies.

This investment has turned out to be extremely profitable. Publishers have
been able to charge immense institutional access fees for electronic access to
the journals. When I was studying at Upenn, 20% of undergraduate tuition went
to paying for institutional access.

The notion of preprint archives have been a somewhat successful work around.
This basically creates a free distributable version of the work before the
copyright is transfered from the authors to the publisher. Unfortunately,
physics and math are the only disciplines that have established the use of
preprint archives as a norm.

------
gasull
Because they are a business, and they need the money to survive. As far as I
know, advertising isn't common in scientific journals.

You can usually read them for free in most universities, since they are
subscribed.

~~~
mhluongo
Instead of advertising, many make up for their costs through endowments and
charging an author to publish.

------
tomjen3
Because they can. Peer-review publications are the way people measure the
worthiness of academics, so their producers job depend on getting published in
prestigious scientific journals, so they put up with it.

The only way this is ever going to chance is if they make the law such that
you have to publish in a free to access journal, but since the current mafia
has all the money, who do you think has the most lobbyists?

~~~
mhluongo
If an open-access journal can become reputable enough, the niche in a field
interested in the journal will publish there- period. It doesn't require laws
to be passed.

~~~
tomjen3
The worthiness of journals, for the purpose of determining how much grant
money a publication should count for at least, will be determined by official
regulation soon enough if Danish politicians gets their will through.

And woe to any upstart then.

------
TheEzEzz
The internet allows for a much more powerful system than the current journal
system, much more powerful than even an open journal system.

Some things I'd like to see in a unified online open system:

* Hyperlinking between papers

* Discussion threads for papers

* Collaborative mark ups of papers, so that difficult papers can be communally dissected and fleshed out, or so that students can work through a paper and provide a mark up to ease the reading for other students

* An ongoing wiki for every subfield, detailing current outstanding problems, papers to read to get up to speed, most recent progress, etc, as well as curating accepted knowledge. Wikis should also be able to be marked up by students, so that difficult material can be broken down and fleshed out for the sake of other students.

~~~
mhluongo
You've got some great ideas, but some of them are stymied by academic ego. For
example, in peer review, reviews are generally unnamed. A discussion thread
based system can suffer from what peer review did - people refuse to comment
negatively with an attached name.

A great example of moving in this direction is the recent P=NP discussion that
happened largely on Dick Lipton's blog
([http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2010/08/08/a-proof-that-p-
is-n...](http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2010/08/08/a-proof-that-p-is-not-equal-
to-np/)).

------
davi
An answer [1] from a horse's mouth (Floyd Bloom, former editor of _Science_
magazine, originator of the aphorism, "The gain in the brain lies mainly in
the stain"[2]):

MI: Was it clear to you when you started out at as Editor-in-Chief of Science
how important the move to electronic publishing was going to be?

FB: When I got to Science, it was quickly explained to me that the price for
paper was going up. The price for postage was going up, and I was asked where
in the budget did I want to make the cuts in order that we wouldn't be in a
deficit. And so it occurred to me, if I was constantly going to be confronted
by changes in paper costs and postal rates, which I couldn't control, I would
have to find another way to distribute the magazine. And we decided we had to
be online quickly.

MI: So the age of electronic publishing really came to fruition while you were
at Science. Were there issues that you faced for which you really had to
define limits as to how far electronic publishing could go?

FB: Well, PubMed Central [the initiative put forth by the National Library of
Medicine to archive and disseminate biomedical research findings] was one of
the last issues that I faced, and I think, faced down. It was wrong-headed in
its origins. But the concept that people should have access to the scientific
literature is of course a good one. Scientists want to have access to research
findings so that they can pursue experiments. And when scientists are
confronted by a publisher's wall that says you must be a subscriber to get in
here, you'd like to find a way to get around it.

But to me, nothing is free. I am aware of the cost of making a prestigious
publication. The cost of rejecting 95 percent of all the papers that are
submitted makes the accepted ones so valuable. And there's only twenty-four
hours in a day, no matter how intense your efforts to keep up with research
reports. If I have time to read, I'm going to read in a place where I know
that the information has been thoroughly vetted, and so I limit my reading to
places where I can trust the judgment of the editors. If everything were free,
and everybody could publish everything they want to, anyplace, I'd have no way
to know how to sort things out. I certainly don't have time to read through a
lot of very provocative assertions that turn out not to be true.

[1] excerpt from <http://molinterv.aspetjournals.org/content/1/4/192.full> [2]
Appel 1996 Ann NY Acad Sci "Classical and Contemporary Histochemical
Approaches for Evaluating Central Nervous System Microanatomy"

~~~
billswift
>I limit my reading to places where I can trust the judgment of the editors.

I have read enough papers that I don't trust any editors. I read based on what
I have read of the authors and on what has been recommended by reviewers I
trust. If neither is available, I generally read abstracts more or less at
random until one catches my attention (usually by being more specific to my
needs than most). There have been too many times that groupthink or political
correctness has captured journals to trust them too far.

------
synergence
IMHO what we need is more innovation in publishing. May be an open-access
model that allows authors to build research projects as daily/weekly updates
with room for "dynamic invited open peer-review" would make an interesting
experiment.

------
cwhittle
For Biomed articles, Pubmed (pubmed.gov) offers free access to articles over a
year old as of 2008, and sometimes sooner. Also, I often find it handy to
google the full article name or the author, as many times authors may have
posted a copy on their webpages.

Some are (PLoS (<http://www.plos.org>), BioMed Central
(<http://www.biomedcentral.com/>), many small highly specialized journals),
but overall many publishers still are similar to magazines.

A few things you may not be aware of in science publishing (at least for my
area, biomed):

-The journals argued main role is to peer review research and distribute it. To do so, they engage researchers to act as peer reviewers, who take uncompensated time to do so.

\- Journal articles are often noted as "advertisements" because the authors
must actually pay for their publication, usually a 1-3K or so. Additional
charges for color figures and such. This is not limited to non-profit
journals. Some journals have an immediate open access option, which for a
higher publication fee, your article can be fully publicly available as soon
as its published. Also, NIH grants now allow for some request for publication
fees and some universities have programs to aid a research in paying the
additional costs of publishing open access immediately.

\- With many journals, you must give up your copyright to the material to the
journal. So, if you'd like to use a figure you made of your data in another
context (grant application, review publication, dissertation, website, book,
etc) you have to seek approval from the journal.

\- More recently (2008), if you get funding from the NIH, you must deposit a
copy of your publication into PubMed Central
(<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/>) within 12 months of publication. Now,
12 months is a ridiculous amount of time in science really, but at least it's
progress.

By the way, although universities generally provide "free" access to many
journals, they also pay ridiculous amounts of money to offer access to those
journals that are not open access.

Science publishing (at least, biomed) is currently going through the same
growing pains in the digital era that many paper-based businesses are going
through (newspapers, magazines). Their main business is two-fold really, 1)
disseminating research and 2) peer-reviewing research. The internet make #1
largely obsolete. They now act primarily as a filter for "interestingness" and
as a prestige-meter. There are many arguments that the current model for #2 is
highly outdated, but the funding agencies (eg., government) and scientists as
whole are generally a pretty conservative crowd that is resistant to change.

