It's important to recognize that PLOS' new data sharing policy is only about data directly tied to the publication of a traditional journal article. So while PLOS authors are being forced to share their data, it's only done in the context of a published article, which will accrue citations, recognition, and attribution in the standard way.
So any data shared by this policy WILL absolutely be tied to the traditional methods of scientific credit, via the linked journal article. To me, requiring that reasonable data is published and archived alongside scientific literature doesn't seem absurd at all.
> Journals try to enforce data sharing because they want to maintain their position as arbiters of academic affairs.
Is there any evidence behind this claim? PLOS seems to behave in exactly the opposite way. It's true that SOME journals use extreme selectivity or control over copyright to maintain their position as arbiters of science. But PLOS, whose largest journal PLOS One is both open access and makes no judgment on the impact of the science it publishes, seems to be actively reducing the amount of control it exerts over academic activities.
While this problem may be true of certain poor actors in some fields of science, I would argue that it's far more the exception than the rule.
My experience (in genomics / evolutionary genetics) was overwhelmingly positive, with huge amounts of collaboration all around. Scientists did try to publish at the highest-impact journal because they care about their career prospects, and there were often competitive labs racing to the finish line with a breakthrough publication.
But I never saw researchers withhold important details in order to accelerate their own publication or to hamper the efforts of others. By and large, I saw huge teams collaborating on large projects with a deep sense of purpose to move the field forward and improve understanding.
In fact research funding in genomics became so collaborative — with increasing portions of the research budget being put towards huge consortium-based projects — that smaller labs began criticizing funding agencies because their smaller projects weren't being funded. These projects are typically more competitive and higher risk, yielding potentially high-impact articles with a far smaller number of authors.
What's the answer in the end? As with many things, it's balance. Cooperation is great, but to a fault. Sometimes having small labs working in relative isolation, even competing against other small labs, can yield great innovation and progress. Other times you need a huge collaborative effort to do something big, expensive and important for the future of the field.
This is a very cool technical integration between two services that are — or should be — used by most scientists working in code. But what exactly is the "problem" of citation of code that this solution fixes?
Let's say you release your project to GitHub & figshare and now have a DOI in hand. What are you supposed to do with it? Do you ask your users to cite this DOI if they use your software? If so, what text should accompany the citation? How do you track citations to your code? Will they show up in Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science?
And what if the journal one of your users is submitting to doesn't accept figshare / github citations? It's unfortunate but true that many publishers disallow citations to unpublished / non-academic works. This is why many scientific software projects have resorted to publishing papers on their software — it's a hack to make a software project fit into the traditional social system of scientific credit.
DOIs are a technical glue that binds together the thousands of academic publishing outlets, but they do not solve the scientific or cultural issue of what is the minimum viable citable scientific product, and how those citations are generated, propagated, or valued.
Securing a DOI only solves a small slice of the problem of scientific credit — a point most colorfully expressed by this blog post from CrossRef, the largest DOI registrar for academic work: http://crosstech.crossref.org/2013/09/dois-unambiguously-and...
This is a really thoughtful post highlighting many of the deeply-rooted problems in securing funding as an early-stage academic. It's depressing for bright young scientists to be looking forward to lives as assistant professors submitting grant after grant with an expected ~10% success rate.
But what surprised me most was that at the end of the essay, after having described his fear of facing such uncertainty in NIH funding, the author mentions that he left academia to co-found a startup making software for life scientists.
Indeed, I left academia for a startup. Securing funding for ZappyLab is by no means easy (http://anothersb.blogspot.com/2014/03/hello-startup-sequel-t...) But as hard as it is, there are many VCs, angels, and there is crowd funding (we are running a Kickstarter campaign now). Certainly not easy, but there are more options. You run a genetics lab and lose your NIH grant - where do you go?
At least with a start-up your fate is much much, much, more in your own hands. It's really pretty astounding nowadays how many grants get rejected over the the tiniest things. I just had an application rejected (with high marks) due to it (1) focusing too heavily on what the call for applications primarily asked for, and (2) not numbering the pages.
Really cool to see this! I'm sure the effort required to make it open source will pay off in fostering an active technical community. Given the target market I'm sure you have many highly skilled users who would love (at the very least) to fix their favorite bugs.
On a related note, recently at http://paperpile.com/ we've been thinking about ways to help our users connect their reference manager with web-based writing environments like ShareLaTeX. We've had some ideas about how to do this simply and cleanly, but I suppose now we could show you guys (via pull request) rather than tell now. :-)
We'd love to start pushing forward on some reference manager integrations, so a pull request would be amazing! It might be best to have a quick chat about how to implement this. My email should be in my profile.
Really? As far as I can tell extensions like Evernote (3.2m users), Pocket (1.5m) and Buffer (250k) are heavily used, well understood, and loved by many average consumers.
You could make the argument that the variety of use cases is limited: all of the above are fairly simple "click a button to save somewhere" apps, and they don't do too much fancy integration beyond laying an iframe with their save dialog onto the page.
Our own academic-focused extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/paperpile-extensio...) is a bit more niche, but does some cool stuff: we use the background page to parse metadata from PDFs, content scripts to insert buttons into academic search results (Buffer does something similar for Twitter), and it plugs into Google Docs to provide an extra layer of UI.
But alas, the most useful thing our extension does is similar to Evernote/Pocket/Buffer: save a piece of content (in this case journal articles) for later.
I think the problem with doing cool extension stuff is that it's often really hard to get just right: you need to tread carefully when working on a system that could interfere with your user's most basic browsing experience!
These clauses are aggressively anti-librarian, and unfortunately librarians don't have a choice but to subscribe at whatever price. Academic papers don't exist in a competitive marketplace; once a non-open access paper is published it's considered part of the permanent academic literature, which academics are professionally required to read and cite. Yet each paper is only available from the publisher that owns its copyright.
It's no wonder why Elsevier draws such ire from the librarian community... an analogy would be if a company legally disallowed its employees from discussing their salaries with anyone, in order to reduce the information available when any other employee negotiates a salary or raise.
And even though David Tempest argues that the main reason for these clauses is to maintain price differentiation between countries, I'd guess that this policy is equally designed to convince small but well-funded US research institutes to keep their non-discount subscriptions, while giving relatively steep discounts to large accounts like the UC system that have negotiating power due to their size.
Fundamentally, the ecosystem of subscription journals is full of non-market dynamics and requires extensive legal management (think NDAs, copyright transfer agreements, DMCA takedowns and copyright infringement enforcement). On the other hand, the rise of Open Access journals has produced a healthy competitive market, where authors can choose where to publish based on a variety of factors including cost, quality of peer review, user-friendly submission tools, and prestige of the journal brand. Plus, copyright is largely a non-issue for open access: authors keep their copyright and there's no cost to the publisher for enforcing against infringement.
I think the more market-driven nature of OA, plus the obvious desire to have publicly-funded research be publicly available, will compound its growth and cause it to eventually overtake the subscription journal model.
It's no wonder why Elsevier draws such ire from the librarian community... an analogy would be if a company legally disallowed its employees from discussing their salaries with anyone, in order to reduce the information available when any other employee negotiates a salary or raise.
A great comment, but did you intend the part I quoted as ironic? You are correct about the intent and the effect, but I think many (most?) companies request this of employees, and some require it. For managers and supervisors in some states, this is even legally defensible: http://ask.metafilter.com/45192/Wait-you-make-50k-more-than-...
No, I didn't intend the irony — I didn't know it was common for employers to formally request that salaries be kept confidential.
However, even if intra-company sharing is discouraged / disallowed, it is still common for job-seekers to know what salary they could expect based on their skill level, other offers of employment, sites like glassdoor, etc.
Perhaps more accurately, you might say journal subscription NDAs are like the only employer in the world threatening to fire you if you ever posted your salary to glassdoor or shared it with a friend who's just starting his career what he might expect to make.
There's nothing controversial here — Elsevier merely bumped up the rate at which they're sending Academia.edu takedown notices for obvious infringement by its users.
What's more interesting to me is that ResearchGate, a site which is virtually identical to Academia.edu in its "mission" and design, has been redistributing a shockingly large number of Elsevier PDFs for a long time. Unless these google searches are misleading, there seem to be many thousands of them:
I'm really stumped as to how ResearchGate gets away with this, but Academia.edu is getting hit with DMCA takedowns. Maybe Elsevier and other publishers haven't yet learned to reliably "find" ResearchGate's shared papers, or perhaps they've come up with some arrangement that allows them to publicly share thousands of paywalled PDFs with impunity?
The DMCA isn't enforceable in Germany, but there is a similar mechanism called the European Union Copyright Directive [1] which applies to at the very least to Italy, Austria, Germany and the UK.
Re: PDF / attachment handling, you may be interested in what Paperpile (http://paperpile.com) does with PDFs: we create a subfolder in your Google Drive space which automatically stays synced with your reference library, so PDFs and supplementary files are accessible from anywhere.
It's tuned more specifically towards academic work than Evernote, but the Drive sync is quite simple and robust.
(Disclaimer: I co-develop Paperpile, a web-based reference manager)
I don't even.... this is amazing. I've been toying with the idea of making something like this, but could never have produced anything as good. I don't know when I was last this excited about a piece of software. When the paperpile option appeared next to PDFs via the Chrome extension - goosebumps! Thank you, this solves a massive problem I have and have had for a while, and despite trying all kinds of managers have never found anything which really combines organization with raw PDF access in a distributed manner.
A large chunk of ORCID actually is open source: https://github.com/ORCID/ORCID-Source (though I don't necessarily agree that it should be, since ORCID is not a library or tool, but rather a service that only has real value if there's a single instance in existence).
I think there's a misunderstanding here on what ORCID is exactly. The name is an acronym for "Open Researcher and Contributor ID." It has nothing to do with publishing, but rather is being built as a central arbiter of academic identity.
Academics love to measure their importance by the papers they've authored or co-authored. Most databases currently track the names of authors associated with each published paper. But names are frustratingly ambiguous or degenerate, which makes it difficult to do things like create an auto-updated list of all the papers you've published.
ORCID is a publisher-funded non profit designed to reduce ambiguity in author identification, by simply assigning a UUID to every researcher. This is a case of publishers agreeing that collaboratively funding a single, centralized technical solution will benefit everyone much more than having a bunch of competing, siloed systems.
So any data shared by this policy WILL absolutely be tied to the traditional methods of scientific credit, via the linked journal article. To me, requiring that reasonable data is published and archived alongside scientific literature doesn't seem absurd at all.
> Journals try to enforce data sharing because they want to maintain their position as arbiters of academic affairs.
Is there any evidence behind this claim? PLOS seems to behave in exactly the opposite way. It's true that SOME journals use extreme selectivity or control over copyright to maintain their position as arbiters of science. But PLOS, whose largest journal PLOS One is both open access and makes no judgment on the impact of the science it publishes, seems to be actively reducing the amount of control it exerts over academic activities.