If it is funded by government in any way (public university, research project) I think it is borderline defrauding the tax payer that the research funded by tax-money is not free by default. Since close to all research is government funded in some way, shape or form...my answer would be yes in the general case.
I think the long term answer is decentralized publishing. Publish everything you do on a university or private website and let others decide if it's good or not when they want to cite it instead of a peer review that is set in stone. I think people reading papers deciding if they want to cite you are smart enough to figure out if it's good research or not. The peer review process is overrated (and quite often suffers from insider networks). If you decentralize publishing you can also have other researchers upvote a paper to basically approve of the academic standards in the paper.
I also think the static nature of papers is a problem. I'd much rather cite a specific version of the paper. I'm thinking about git and pull requests along the lines of "want to cite, fixed layout" or "new research disproves this" etc.
I don't have a ton of time to search each university's publication database or every 2nd tier research team's private home-grown web site.
Journals provide a filtering intermediary that helps me better use my time. Hopefully I can figure out which editorial teams are going to publish good vs ok vs crap research and pick from those, relying on the curative capabilities of their staff to provide interesting and useful reading.
Journals should still want to publish great research, and publicly funded research should still be available to the public. Maybe there's indeed a more relaxed middle-ground to "just put it all out there and hope folks find and share it." We all agree the journal industry needs some help, but I don't think society is well-served by completely decimating its economic model.
Science has been for hundreds of years the most open and transparent institution. But I think that recently it has appeared a new contender that is even most transparent, open software development. I think science could use the same approach for research, from step zero.
One scientist has an idea, he publishes his hypothesis and intended metodology. Others can jump in and tell him, for example, that the hypothesis has been proved wrong in a recent paper, or suggest improvements in his methodology. Others can chip in and offer to replicate the experiment to increase the sample size. Mathematicians could observe and correct the statistical analysis before the conclusion are published. I think that will improve the quality of the results.
Of course, the bigger problem is that most papers would have dozens or hundreds of authors, diluting the individual contribution of each one. On the other hand, finished reasearch already would be peer reviewed and corrected.
Lately I have been thinking about this, and I figured that publishing/citing can be described exactly using a Merkle tree. Things like ipfs have been on the hn front page quite a lot, I wonder whether anybody thought about using them to decentralize paper publishing.
I am not sure what percentage of pay walled papers are gov't funded. I suspect many come from private universities or large companies. As for paper versioning, this is already done to some extent. Not as explicit as code on github, but many authors will release multiple versions of a paper. That being said, it is trivial to do versioning as described if you use latex and put your paper's source on github.
I agree with your first premise - yes, they should be free. In this sense, the peer review process should be paid for by whoever funds the research, rather than whoever wants to read it.
And what do you think about companies that perform large-scale medical analysis on genomic data of customers, and keep their research behind closed doors?
(Probably not a big issue right now, but it could be in the future).
Full disclosure: I'm a founder of a company called Scholastica that provides software that helps journals peer-review and publish open-access content online. One of our journal clients, Discrete Analysis, is linked to in the NYT article.
It is incredibly obvious that journal content shouldn't cost as much as it does.
- Scholars write the content for free
- Scholars do the peer-review for free
- All the legacy publishers do is take the content and paywall PDF files
Can you believe it? Paywalling. PDFs. For billions.
Of course the publishers say they create immense value by typesetting said PDFs, but as technologists, we can clearly see that this is bunk.
There's a comment in this thread that mentions the manual work involved in taking Word files and getting them into PDFs, XML, etc. While that is an issue, which you could consider a technology problem, it definitely doesn't justify the incredible cost of journal content that has been created and peer-reviewed at no cost. Keep in mind that journal prices have risen much faster than the consumer price index since the 80s (1).
The future is very clear, academics do the work as they've always done and share the content with the public at a very low cost via the internet.
Scholars actually pay journals to publish their papers. No, this isn't vanity press or a bribe. Scholars must work very hard to reach the point where they can pay those fees.
For example, say you submit a paper to Nature. Odds are it will be rejected, because Nature has a high impact factor. Say your paper is both accepted and passes the review process. Now you have to pay Nature to publish your paper. Depending on the options you ask for (e.g. making it free to download costs extra) you can wind up paying thousands.
No university is going to say to one of their researchers, "Hey, could you maybe not get accepted by Nature quite so much? It's expensive!". Nature knows this.
Also, the format of submission varies by field. While word files may be standard in some fields, in others latex is expected. Obviously, typesetting a latex document is pretty gosh-darned easy for a script to do.
Of course the publishers say they create immense value by typesetting said PDFs, but as technologists, we can clearly see that this is bunk.
Amusingly, when I was a grad student, some friends showed me how they could use LaTeX to produce a manuscript that looked like a spitting image of a Physical Review article.
I still believe publishers have value, but recently some of them have figured out how to do as little work as possible while making the most money.
Who can blame them in a capitalist society. Anyway, I'm glad to see people respond via places like Arxiv. Sci-Hub is more like civil disobedience. Great that it happened for all the learners out there, but it's going to make some people very angry because they have bet their careers or invested based on the idea that the government protects and enforces copyright agreements.
We want people to invest in research. Academia has been very lucky in this regard as higher level institutions have continually grown in America. Should people begin to feel that investing in research has no return value, there might not be so many tenureships around in the future. I don't think this is happening I'm just conjecturing and suggesting that while a correction is definitely needed, I'm not sure leaping to the "all free" model is going to work for every scientific community. I could be 100% wrong though. I like the direction in which we are headed. It's more trusting, and I think that means growth for a society.
"This is despite the fact that the publishers’
action directly addressed a very real
economic problem."
This "very real economic problem" that the author describes is not making enough of money off of textbooks. The publishers have lost all relevance by having contorted themselves over the years to fit into a model which no longer makes sense.
Journals can run themselves (with proper software) and historical impact factor needs to be abolished.
> Can you believe it? Paywalling. PDFs. For billions.
Wow, I'm amazed that a scientists of all people would tolerate such a scam. Why don't they come together, and en masse leave these pay-walled journals, and switch to free open ones?
In politics, you hear about how uneducated voters are tricked by politicians, but this is far more worse. Here you've got some of the most intelligent and creative people on the planet knowingly allow themselves to be screwed over. Wow.
When I finished my PhD at Northwestern, part of the university's procedure involved going to the ProQuest Web site. ProQuest is a journal and dissertation publishing company.
They asked if I wanted my dissertation to be available, free of charge, to anyone interested in reading it.
Clicking on "yes, I want to make it available for free" would cost me something like $800.
Clicking on "no, I'll let you charge people to see it" would cost me nothing.
Having just finished, and being in debt to do so, it shouldn't come as a surprise that I wasn't rushing to pay even more. So now, if people want to see my dissertation, they have to pay -- or be part of an institution that pays an annual fee to ProQuest. (BTW, e-mail me if you want a copy.)
My guess is that it's similar with other journals. And while professors have more than PhD students, they have limited enough research funds that they'll hold their nose, save the money, and keep things behind a paywall.
Which is totally outrageous. It's about time that this change, and I'm happy to see what looks like the beginning of the end on this front.
There is an alternative: you host your thesis (and/or papers) on your own website, or you put them on arXiv.org. It's called self-archiving and it's allowed by most publishers. Funny thing is: making your papers available for free also increases the number of citations, something academics really care about.
There's nothing that stops you from uploading the PDF elsewhere, right? Why not just push the file to some free hosting service (or even GitHub in a GitHub Pages repo)?
Some things, like dissemination of knowledge, are truly in the interest of all humanity. It seems criminal that a few hundred people at the publishing houses should benefit at the expense of billions' welfare.
All everything 'should' be free. At least, that which is not scarce.
The correct question to ask is 'can' all research papers be free - does the world continue to spin, will research still happen, will we still progress, if they are free?
The only reason we even have this debate to begin with is because the producers of this information require scarce/controlled resources in order to survive.
This is so not true. Closed-access journals do not pay authors. There's no advance. There are no royalties. At best, they don't charge authors for publishing their work. They don't pay reviewers, and typically not even editors. Maybe they do pay for editing. But that is minuscule cost, relative to $30 per copy.
What happened here is that jerks hijacked the academic publishing industry. They turned a system that was largely pro bono publico into an intellectual pyramid scam. Academia has been slow to respond, mired in the web of prestigious citation. But maybe this is the end game.
Producers are funded by grants or private research funding. They get no money that are paid for access to articles, that is why they publish preprints for free.
It's not exactly post-scarcity, it's just zero marginal cost. It's true that, given the product has already been created and has zero marginal cost, it "should" be free. But for setting the expectations that producers of future products have about what compensation they'll receive we can't simply say it should be free.
I think Elbakyan should do everything to make sci-hub easily replaceable. Once it's hosted on multiple places it would be much harder to shut down.
Maybe completely free research papers are not the future but there should be a Spotify for research papers that is affordable for everyone. I hope that Elbakyan will reach her goal and ultimately change the whole industry.
Also, a research that has been at least partially tax-funded resulting in a publication, must not be usable as an necessary ingredient for a commercial patent.
That is, a patent can include this type of research, but it cannot be a 'necessity' for the patent to be viable. Or, if the particular research, is necessary for a given patent to be viable, the patent must grant no-fees, no-commercial-strings-attached use.
This allows a corporation to establish patents as means to protect itself, while allowing the tax funded research to be used by others without commercial strings attached
Something I'd like to see here: results published in research papers aggregated and released as open data.
There must be a lot of interesting meta-analyses that aren't getting done because the necessary data is locked away behind paywalls, and usually not in an easily machine readable format into the bargain.
> “The real people to blame are the leaders of the scientific community — Nobel scientists, heads of institutions, the presidents of universities — who are in a position to change things but have never faced up to this problem in part because they are beneficiaries of the system,” said Dr. Eisen. “University presidents love to tout how important their scientists are because they publish in these journals.”
For me, this is the cog of the problem. People who are in a position to change should push for it.
There must be thousands of people who could use free access to research papers: PhDs and Masters now in industry trying to apply the state of the art, engineers who have worked their way into a subject, concerned citizens who want to read the source material.
I am a PhD who'd love to be working in industry, but I'm shit scared that once I leave the gates of the university I'll simply lose touch with the state of the art because the papers will no longer be accessible.
Many university library systems have programs where alumni (and sometimes outsiders) can purchase access to their resources for a yearly fee. If that's unavailable to you or cost prohibitive, most academic libraries are open to the public. When I worked at an engineering library for a large university, a good part of my day was spent helping working professional access these kinds of resources.
Depends on your field, but my local library has the latest Cell, Science and Nature magazines for perusal, and anything older than 1 year is usually released gratis. If you need more than this to stay up to the state-of-the-art, chances are your future "industry" job will also have access to this, or it will become more of a hobby.
Just my opinion as a PhD, working in industry, who does not read nearly as much as he used to.
It is in the best interests of humanity to make the knowledge obtained through research available to anyone looking for that knowledge. There is a clear consensus among scientists that the current publishing model is at best inexpedient and at worst hostile to that end.
Most people are asking what good the current publishing model provides, but I think to answer that question we need to ask: "compared to what?" It seems clear to me that the current model is better than having no publishing mechanism at all, but I doubt that anyone seriously thinks that the "none" model is the only alternative.
I think that if we sat down today and thought up a new publishing model from scratch, we would be able to outdo the status quo on just about every "good" people have mentioned here, as well as provide features that the current model is incapable of. I think it is highly likely that we could make a system that ran on donated resources alone.
Some things we might want/have in a "from scratch" model:
1. Direct access to data-as-in-a-database instead of data-as-a-graph-in-a-PDF
2. Blockchain-based reputation system for scientists
3. P2P storage and sharing of scientific data
4. Tiers of scientific information, e.g. an informal forum-of-science, semi-formal wiki-of-science, and formal publications
5. Automated peer review process
6. A better and more consistent authoring tool for scientists
The main problems with tax-funded research and grants is that money is given in return for citations in journals with high "impact factor". As a result, publishers of those journals are indirectly supported by the state. Instead, government or funding organizations should review the results of the work for themselves, but they are unable to do it, because they usually don't understand a thing about research subject.
That's the problem, organizations don't want do do the work so they outsource it. But the journal market is not free, it's dominated by incumbents who earned the position centuries ago. As the experience with open access journals shows so far, it's near impossible to get scientists to volunteer their free labor to a new journal. Regulatory action (like requiring open access for all govt-funded science) should be taken here.
Can someone explain me why the researchers themselves don't publish their work for free? The article says they are not paid for the articles so I don't see why they couldn't do that.
Publishing used to cost money when it required physical printing/distrubution/storage of journals. Now all of this is basically free, but they still charge. Most theoretical physicists for example only care about "publishing" in the ArXiv (all free, open source). The traditional publishing is ridiculous.
I hope this publicitly doesnt lead to swift shutdown of scihub. She provides us with a great service that helps many researchers work faster. We should also commend her for stirring the most lively debate about an anachronistic and dumb publishing system.
This isn't the right question. The question is, "Who should be profiting from research papers?" The Journal performs quality control for the sake of consistency and prestige, but the papers and their reviews are put together by researchers, commonly at great cost for marginal personal gain. The article's hero doesn't really care. She needs to read papers, and needs other people to be able to read them, so she built sci-hub (demo: https://sci-hub.io/10.1038/nature16990).
WRT
> This isn't the right question. The question is, "Who should be profiting from research papers?"
I am not sure that the way you put it s right either.
Because "who should be profiting from research papers?" is too generic of a question, and does not appear to necessarily supersede the question 'should tax-funded publication be readable for free?'
If I may rephrase your question to be:
"Quality control of a research paper, must be, necessarily funded (either by money or a form of barter).
Therefore question a) who should fund it, question b) who should receive funding to do the quality control"
Then, obviously, this is an important question. And I do not believe has been clearly answered either in polices or on this forum.
My answer to ( a ) would be -- the same entity that funds the research (therefore in this case the tax payers)
My answer to ( b ) would be -- a licensed or otherwise professionally certified group, independently selected (that is not selected by the researcher that authors the publication).
What follows is just my very uninformed opinion. I'm not a scientist myself, but my interest in CS and math has made me an avid reader of scientific papers and books - whenever they're publicly available, that is.
What publishing houses do is exploit the rules of the social games that scientists themselves willingly play. When the importance of an academic work is judged by the names of its authors, or by the name of the journal in which it is published, or by the presence of fashionable keywords in its title or in the abstract, scientists are giving publishing houses the very rope with which they will be hanged. So, while the behavior of publishing houses is certainly antisocial and most abominable, it is only made possible by the very scientific community that condemns it.
Is there any fundamental reason why scientists can't always submit their papers to the arXiv, and let the web of citations determine their relative importance?
In my country, for example, most applications for tenure, salary complements, required assessments, etc., have an assessment scale like this (simplified but this is basically the idea):
Paper in the 1st quartile of the ISI JCR journal list - 3 points
Paper in the 2nd quartile of the ISI JCR journal list - 2 points
Paper in the 3rd quartile of the ISI JCR journal list - 1 points
Rest - 0 points
So if you publish a ground-breaking paper in arXiv that everyone reads and everyone cites, you get exactly zero points.
Of course, stuff like length of the paper, number of authors, possible overlap with other published papers, or just actual quality (as in someone reading the paper to see whether it's any good) also count zero. And then you have the roulette factor of submitting a paper to a first-quartile journal in year X, which gets published in year X+1 (due to the length of the publication process), only to see that in year X+1 the journal is now fourth-quartile as in CS they are dancing all the time...
Providing more open access to existing research information is just as important as empowering people to share and distribute the findings of their research in formats that both machines and people can understand. I believe we have already produced large amounts of data in wildly different fields of study that can potentially be used with the help of machines (and the diverse perspectives of many humans) to solve problems for which we currently don't have answers.
It looks like the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) bill linked in the article would be a step in the right direction for US citizens. I wonder how other forces (like Sci-Hub) will affect the direction of things to come.
[+] [-] kriro|10 years ago|reply
I think the long term answer is decentralized publishing. Publish everything you do on a university or private website and let others decide if it's good or not when they want to cite it instead of a peer review that is set in stone. I think people reading papers deciding if they want to cite you are smart enough to figure out if it's good research or not. The peer review process is overrated (and quite often suffers from insider networks). If you decentralize publishing you can also have other researchers upvote a paper to basically approve of the academic standards in the paper. I also think the static nature of papers is a problem. I'd much rather cite a specific version of the paper. I'm thinking about git and pull requests along the lines of "want to cite, fixed layout" or "new research disproves this" etc.
[+] [-] mattlutze|10 years ago|reply
Journals provide a filtering intermediary that helps me better use my time. Hopefully I can figure out which editorial teams are going to publish good vs ok vs crap research and pick from those, relying on the curative capabilities of their staff to provide interesting and useful reading.
Journals should still want to publish great research, and publicly funded research should still be available to the public. Maybe there's indeed a more relaxed middle-ground to "just put it all out there and hope folks find and share it." We all agree the journal industry needs some help, but I don't think society is well-served by completely decimating its economic model.
[+] [-] mvaliente2001|10 years ago|reply
One scientist has an idea, he publishes his hypothesis and intended metodology. Others can jump in and tell him, for example, that the hypothesis has been proved wrong in a recent paper, or suggest improvements in his methodology. Others can chip in and offer to replicate the experiment to increase the sample size. Mathematicians could observe and correct the statistical analysis before the conclusion are published. I think that will improve the quality of the results.
Of course, the bigger problem is that most papers would have dozens or hundreds of authors, diluting the individual contribution of each one. On the other hand, finished reasearch already would be peer reviewed and corrected.
[+] [-] doppioandante|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrdrozdov|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathattack|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|10 years ago|reply
(Probably not a big issue right now, but it could be in the future).
[+] [-] _pmf_|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robertwalsh0|10 years ago|reply
It is incredibly obvious that journal content shouldn't cost as much as it does.
- Scholars write the content for free
- Scholars do the peer-review for free
- All the legacy publishers do is take the content and paywall PDF files
Can you believe it? Paywalling. PDFs. For billions.
Of course the publishers say they create immense value by typesetting said PDFs, but as technologists, we can clearly see that this is bunk.
There's a comment in this thread that mentions the manual work involved in taking Word files and getting them into PDFs, XML, etc. While that is an issue, which you could consider a technology problem, it definitely doesn't justify the incredible cost of journal content that has been created and peer-reviewed at no cost. Keep in mind that journal prices have risen much faster than the consumer price index since the 80s (1).
The future is very clear, academics do the work as they've always done and share the content with the public at a very low cost via the internet.
PS. If you want a peek into how the publishers see the whole Sci-Hub kerfuffle, check out this post from one of their industry blogs - the comment section is a doozy: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2016/03/02/sci-hub-and-th...
1. https://cdn1.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/jtj2dzMfklULQipRZt_3xaLoFxU...
[+] [-] beloch|10 years ago|reply
For example, say you submit a paper to Nature. Odds are it will be rejected, because Nature has a high impact factor. Say your paper is both accepted and passes the review process. Now you have to pay Nature to publish your paper. Depending on the options you ask for (e.g. making it free to download costs extra) you can wind up paying thousands.
No university is going to say to one of their researchers, "Hey, could you maybe not get accepted by Nature quite so much? It's expensive!". Nature knows this.
Also, the format of submission varies by field. While word files may be standard in some fields, in others latex is expected. Obviously, typesetting a latex document is pretty gosh-darned easy for a script to do.
[+] [-] analog31|10 years ago|reply
Amusingly, when I was a grad student, some friends showed me how they could use LaTeX to produce a manuscript that looked like a spitting image of a Physical Review article.
That was in 1992.
[+] [-] studentrob|10 years ago|reply
Who can blame them in a capitalist society. Anyway, I'm glad to see people respond via places like Arxiv. Sci-Hub is more like civil disobedience. Great that it happened for all the learners out there, but it's going to make some people very angry because they have bet their careers or invested based on the idea that the government protects and enforces copyright agreements.
We want people to invest in research. Academia has been very lucky in this regard as higher level institutions have continually grown in America. Should people begin to feel that investing in research has no return value, there might not be so many tenureships around in the future. I don't think this is happening I'm just conjecturing and suggesting that while a correction is definitely needed, I'm not sure leaping to the "all free" model is going to work for every scientific community. I could be 100% wrong though. I like the direction in which we are headed. It's more trusting, and I think that means growth for a society.
[+] [-] sitkack|10 years ago|reply
Journals can run themselves (with proper software) and historical impact factor needs to be abolished.
[+] [-] winter_blue|10 years ago|reply
Wow, I'm amazed that a scientists of all people would tolerate such a scam. Why don't they come together, and en masse leave these pay-walled journals, and switch to free open ones?
In politics, you hear about how uneducated voters are tricked by politicians, but this is far more worse. Here you've got some of the most intelligent and creative people on the planet knowingly allow themselves to be screwed over. Wow.
[+] [-] payne92|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmmBacon|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beambot|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beambot|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wodenokoto|10 years ago|reply
If so, why should nations give away their expensive research that potentially give them an edge either military or commercially?
Personally I almost never traded technology when I played civilization, let alone give it away!
[+] [-] ikeboy|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reuven|10 years ago|reply
They asked if I wanted my dissertation to be available, free of charge, to anyone interested in reading it.
Clicking on "yes, I want to make it available for free" would cost me something like $800.
Clicking on "no, I'll let you charge people to see it" would cost me nothing.
Having just finished, and being in debt to do so, it shouldn't come as a surprise that I wasn't rushing to pay even more. So now, if people want to see my dissertation, they have to pay -- or be part of an institution that pays an annual fee to ProQuest. (BTW, e-mail me if you want a copy.)
My guess is that it's similar with other journals. And while professors have more than PhD students, they have limited enough research funds that they'll hold their nose, save the money, and keep things behind a paywall.
Which is totally outrageous. It's about time that this change, and I'm happy to see what looks like the beginning of the end on this front.
[+] [-] jmvalin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haskal|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imglorp|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stegosaurus|10 years ago|reply
The correct question to ask is 'can' all research papers be free - does the world continue to spin, will research still happen, will we still progress, if they are free?
The only reason we even have this debate to begin with is because the producers of this information require scarce/controlled resources in order to survive.
[+] [-] mirimir|10 years ago|reply
What happened here is that jerks hijacked the academic publishing industry. They turned a system that was largely pro bono publico into an intellectual pyramid scam. Academia has been slow to respond, mired in the web of prestigious citation. But maybe this is the end game.
[+] [-] ycmbntrthrwaway|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] savanaly|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davnn|10 years ago|reply
Maybe completely free research papers are not the future but there should be a Spotify for research papers that is affordable for everyone. I hope that Elbakyan will reach her goal and ultimately change the whole industry.
[+] [-] platform|10 years ago|reply
Also, a research that has been at least partially tax-funded resulting in a publication, must not be usable as an necessary ingredient for a commercial patent.
That is, a patent can include this type of research, but it cannot be a 'necessity' for the patent to be viable. Or, if the particular research, is necessary for a given patent to be viable, the patent must grant no-fees, no-commercial-strings-attached use.
This allows a corporation to establish patents as means to protect itself, while allowing the tax funded research to be used by others without commercial strings attached
[+] [-] jammycakes|10 years ago|reply
There must be a lot of interesting meta-analyses that aren't getting done because the necessary data is locked away behind paywalls, and usually not in an easily machine readable format into the bargain.
[+] [-] denzil_correa|10 years ago|reply
For me, this is the cog of the problem. People who are in a position to change should push for it.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tomahunt|10 years ago|reply
I am a PhD who'd love to be working in industry, but I'm shit scared that once I leave the gates of the university I'll simply lose touch with the state of the art because the papers will no longer be accessible.
[+] [-] alphonsegaston|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DaveWalk|10 years ago|reply
Just my opinion as a PhD, working in industry, who does not read nearly as much as he used to.
[+] [-] bloaf|10 years ago|reply
It is in the best interests of humanity to make the knowledge obtained through research available to anyone looking for that knowledge. There is a clear consensus among scientists that the current publishing model is at best inexpedient and at worst hostile to that end.
Most people are asking what good the current publishing model provides, but I think to answer that question we need to ask: "compared to what?" It seems clear to me that the current model is better than having no publishing mechanism at all, but I doubt that anyone seriously thinks that the "none" model is the only alternative.
I think that if we sat down today and thought up a new publishing model from scratch, we would be able to outdo the status quo on just about every "good" people have mentioned here, as well as provide features that the current model is incapable of. I think it is highly likely that we could make a system that ran on donated resources alone.
Some things we might want/have in a "from scratch" model:
1. Direct access to data-as-in-a-database instead of data-as-a-graph-in-a-PDF
2. Blockchain-based reputation system for scientists
3. P2P storage and sharing of scientific data
4. Tiers of scientific information, e.g. an informal forum-of-science, semi-formal wiki-of-science, and formal publications
5. Automated peer review process
6. A better and more consistent authoring tool for scientists
[+] [-] ycmbntrthrwaway|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] return0|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arbre|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cft|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iabacu|10 years ago|reply
Libraries used to get a physical copy of the papers, which would grant lifetime access to the research.
Today, they pay for subscription, and as soon as they stop paying, they lose access to everything.
[+] [-] return0|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrdrozdov|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] platform|10 years ago|reply
I am not sure that the way you put it s right either.
Because "who should be profiting from research papers?" is too generic of a question, and does not appear to necessarily supersede the question 'should tax-funded publication be readable for free?'
If I may rephrase your question to be: "Quality control of a research paper, must be, necessarily funded (either by money or a form of barter). Therefore question a) who should fund it, question b) who should receive funding to do the quality control"
Then, obviously, this is an important question. And I do not believe has been clearly answered either in polices or on this forum.
My answer to ( a ) would be -- the same entity that funds the research (therefore in this case the tax payers)
My answer to ( b ) would be -- a licensed or otherwise professionally certified group, independently selected (that is not selected by the researcher that authors the publication).
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] catnaroek|10 years ago|reply
What publishing houses do is exploit the rules of the social games that scientists themselves willingly play. When the importance of an academic work is judged by the names of its authors, or by the name of the journal in which it is published, or by the presence of fashionable keywords in its title or in the abstract, scientists are giving publishing houses the very rope with which they will be hanged. So, while the behavior of publishing houses is certainly antisocial and most abominable, it is only made possible by the very scientific community that condemns it.
Is there any fundamental reason why scientists can't always submit their papers to the arXiv, and let the web of citations determine their relative importance?
[+] [-] Al-Khwarizmi|10 years ago|reply
Paper in the 1st quartile of the ISI JCR journal list - 3 points
Paper in the 2nd quartile of the ISI JCR journal list - 2 points
Paper in the 3rd quartile of the ISI JCR journal list - 1 points
Rest - 0 points
So if you publish a ground-breaking paper in arXiv that everyone reads and everyone cites, you get exactly zero points.
Of course, stuff like length of the paper, number of authors, possible overlap with other published papers, or just actual quality (as in someone reading the paper to see whether it's any good) also count zero. And then you have the roulette factor of submitting a paper to a first-quartile journal in year X, which gets published in year X+1 (due to the length of the publication process), only to see that in year X+1 the journal is now fourth-quartile as in CS they are dancing all the time...
[+] [-] KKKKkkkk1|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sekou|10 years ago|reply
It looks like the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) bill linked in the article would be a step in the right direction for US citizens. I wonder how other forces (like Sci-Hub) will affect the direction of things to come.