This problem has to be solved on the supply side. As long as researchers keep voluntarily publishing in journals that jealously guard knowledge from the people who (often) paid for it via their taxes in the first place, nothing will change.
> journals that jealously guard knowledge from the people who (often) paid for it via their taxes in the first place
The only reason the journals can do this is that the governments that fund the research allow them to. A simple change in the rules for government funded research would fix that.
> The only reason the journals can do this is that the governments that fund the research allow them to. A simple change in the rules for government funded research would fix that.
I think that this excellent point is what's missing from most of these discussions: a realisation that most academics, who are under intense pressures to publish, simply don't have the freedom to "vote with their feet" ("vote with their papers", I suppose), and that the change must come from an institutional body. That's why I love open-access policies like the NIH's (http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm):
> The Director of the National Institutes of Health ("NIH") shall require in the current fiscal year and thereafter that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, that the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.
(Actually, this seems to be weaker than what I remember; is there another law that says that NIH-funded works must appear in some open-access forum, or am I misremembering the import of the law?)
The NIH open access policy is not enough. First, it only applies to NIH funded work. Work funded by other agencies does not fall under these rules. Also - I don't think posting papers to Pubmed Central 1 year after publication is quick enough to advance science. And furthermore, the papers are only made freely available in Pubmed Central. The NIH policy does not require papers to be "open" (as in, free to use and reuse in any way one wants).
Oh - and Science is one of, if the the, only journal that does not do deposition to Pubmed Central for the authors. The authors have to do it themselves and many do not.
To be sure!—I agree with all of your points. However, we have to start somewhere, and it is something—I'd rather have an imperfect solution, as long as it stimulates a search for the perfect one, than no solution. For example, as far as I know, no common grants in mathematics carry this stipulation. (I am thinking here of the situation where it is (relatively) easy now to obtain non-DRM'd music; the initial solutions were far from perfect, but they showed that the world didn't end when they were implemented.)
The change is already there in UK: «All articles published by DS/CN are published under a Creative Commons 3.0 CC-BY licence (required for compatibilty with the RCUK mandate, but not offered by many journals in the Humanities and Social Sciences). This means that authors and institutions may also freely republish their work in their own institutional repositories or personal webpages ("Green Open Access").» http://www.digitalstudies.org/ojs/index.php/digital_studies
A second key step that is frequently ignored is that funding has to be provided for publishing in open access (normally it isn't). Publishing budgets are normally very small (if any money is given at all). This often puts quality open access (e.g. PLOS) out of reach.
The last team I was in always wanted to publish open access, but only the Wellcome Trust funded person had a specific budget to pay for it. So we either crammed him on the author list and pretended he contributed significantly (unethical all round) or went non-OA (not what we wanted either).
And this is before we get into whose government paid for what. I was US-funded and working at a British university alongside EU & charity funded researchers. Who has the right to see what? And what if the work was partially funded by a company? Or do you argue that all Europeans have the right to read US-funded work and vice versa? I personally would, but I think many people would disagree if I'd written China instead of the EU.
Also, though I think many people will disagree with this, I'm not sure open access - while ideologically preferable - is a panacea for much at all. I've been publishing OA for >10 years, but in practice it makes virtually no difference to accessibility for professional western researchers. Research papers are perhaps best understood and used as professional communications on method rather than descriptions of truth or the state of the art (as a side note I believe this conflict is where many of the arguments over the quality of the literature arise)*. Professional researchers have access to all the papers they need.
OA really really helps researchers in poor countries. And this is the strongest argument for it, where the impact can really be felt and measured, but this is almost never the argument I see put forward by the tech/gadget communities.
1. I worked at a small research institute for 8 years. The place was called TIGR. It was one of the world leaders in genome sequencing. But we had only 200 people. We did not have subscriptions to most journals. I think this is common - sure - researchers at big universities have access to most papers. But researchers at small ones, or start ups, or reporters, etc do not.
2. Open access is NOT just about getting papers for free. It is also about the license for reuse of materials. When papers are truly open access they can be reused and reshared in diverse ways. This allows for new types of research (e.g., full text cluster analysis) and for better sharing and reuse (e.g., online textbooks).
3. I disagree about research papers being best seen as only professional communications among researchers. I think a good paper should also be readible and understandable (at least in parts) by people outside of the professional research community. The more we engage the public with REAL science the better.
:) I thought I recognised the name, and as a microbial genomics guy myself, I'm pretty familiar with TIGR. I suspect we agree more than disagree on OA, but these are some good points for debate. Genomics has largely been very pro-OA thanks to the efforts of the Wellcome Trust.
1. So I found this quite interesting. I think in the UK it's rare for an institution of that size to not be affiliated with a university and so able to get access. I was at the Sanger which was Cambridge Uni affiliated. However, this is also an issue of journal bundling and secret negotiations. Unless you're suggesting the complete dismantlement of the publishing scene, then this needs a complex solution. And re startups, I'm not sure why giving commercial entities subsidised access to the literature is a priority?
2) Full text analysis is not really an OA issue either (I've also not been very impressed with the results from it so far, but that's a different story). Yes it can be done more easily via OA, but most major publishers are increasingly supporting it. They can be obliged to support it without forcing OA as a publishing model. Many other issues fall under local copyright laws which makes it more complex. However, educational purposes and informal sharing is normally covered by fair use. And even with online textbooks, I'm not sure even if I publish as OA that I necessarily want someone else using it for commercial purposes for free. And licensing commercial use is a valid method for OA publishers to make money, surely (something they are struggling to do)? Of course, there are many different OA models with very varied licensing.
3) So I absolutely agree with improving public engagement, but increasingly methods sections are small print, very small word limit and stuck at the end of the paper. This utterly and fundamentally breaks the most important part of the scientific literature - reproducibility. And that is at crisis level now (ok hyperbole, but have you ever replicated something and not discovered that half the essential information is missing?). Similarly poor but simple/comprehensible papers will be higher rated than superior but complex papers.
We are asking the core literature to server two masters with very different needs, and my instinct is that this is ultimately not tenable. Review papers are far more useful to the public in general, since unless you're getting your hands dirty with the data, and learning it's foibles, then it's difficult to evaluate focussed research. This is especially true when dealing with sequence databases (assumptions of sequence accuracy, over/under representation etc), as I'm sure you appreciate.
Well, so long as advancement, job security and prestige are tied to publication in those journals -- and they are -- the researchers are likely to keep publishing there. I'm not even sure that "voluntary" describes it well.
I've started Onarbor, https://onarbor.com, to address this issue. Onarbor is a publishing and funding platform where all the value in terms of ownership, reputation, and money goes to the academics. The ownership, citation part of the reputation system, and funding are made possible through the Bitcoin Blockchain.
For those interested, I'm a molecular biologist at Harvard (REF.1) and am working to encourage people to give it a try. If you might spread the word or would be interested in hearing more I'd love to hear your thoughts at tim@onarbor.com.
IAt least the author is free to post the article (ok, manuscript) to his own website for free:
"Authors also retain the right and are encouraged to post the accepted version of their manuscript to their personal Web site or institutional repository, immediately following publication by AAAS."
Well, that is the current policy. But that was not the policy when the paper was published. I have asked them previously about this and never gotten an answer as to whether they applu this policy retroactively.
It has been the policy of my lab, and many others, to ignore journal policies on publishing manuscript versions, and post them on our website after the journal publishes the paper. We've never heard of any complaints about this practice, and it results in the papers being available on Google Scholar.
At the very least, you have the moral right to do so. If you're concerned about the legalities, contact your institutions' legal department - this is what they're paid for.
Institutions' legal departments are in the business of minimising legal risk to their employers. There's no upside to them to give the go-ahead to an academic asking 'can I do X' for X dubiously compliant even if probably low-risk, since if they do and then a journal does get up-in-arms about it, they assumed responsibility. Their saying 'no' has no such risk to them. So they're incentivised to err on the conservative side.
I'm starting to get involved with The Winnower (thewinnower.com) their goal is to provide an open peer reviewed processes for publication while providing all the services of a large journal (DOI, help finding reviewers, etc). A lot of people seem to be self publishing on blogs but that lacks authority (and the review processes). We're trying to change that because the current system sucks and there was ever a case for "information wants to be free" this is it.
I'm confused, as I've never delved much into the nature of journals short of what we had to in college. No, I never published a paper. Hopefully someone can explain/answer my question.
Do the publishers (somehow) force the authors to give them exclusive publishing rights or something? If not, why are these authors simply not putting their papers on multiple journal/platforms?
A few comments
1. Authors have a choice of where to publish and there are now many journals that are fully #openaccess. I only publish in such journals when I have a choice.
2. Back when I published this paper, there is little if any discussion of such issues in the Biology community. It just did not occur to me that this would be an issue.
3. Some journals allow one to post preprint versions of papers on preprint servers. In some fields (math and physics) this is common. In others (e.g., biology) this is rare. But we know do this and there are efforts (e.g., BioRXiv) to make this more common.
Publishing in multiple journals is heavily frowned on (and most journals will not republish work irrespective of copyright) since it is normally done to (a) boost publishing records and give the impression of greater productivity (CV padding) & (b) increase the authors' citations (i.e. the impact of the work) & (c) add undue weight to a hypothesis, by increasing the apparent number of papers that support it.
However, this is not a barrier to including papers in institutional repositories etc, simply to publishing in multiple journals.
In math, at least, these transfer-of-copyright forms are increasingly allowing by default posting of (final submitted—see juretriglav (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8194544)'s link for the importance of this modifier) papers to the arXiv, or even just to one's web page. This seems such an elemental freedom now that it can be hard to remember that it wasn't always the case. I remember, but can no longer find—does anyone know the source?—a post a while back from an academic who asked (probably) Elsevier for permission to post an article on his home page, and was denied it, and who then essentially dared them to sue him for posting it anyway.
Whenever I've been published, I've asked to retain copyright and that has been granted -- I'm not sure it's a grant, though, since it's mine to start with. The usual negotiating starting point is a contact from a publisher that automatically claims copyright. I simply delete that clause (and possibly insert "The author retains copyright", so that there's no doubt).
Clearly, that's not happening here and I don't understand why, unless publishers are refusing to publish without being given copyright. In which case, alarm bells should be ringing very loudly.
It's not about handing over copyright but it's generally agreed that publishing multiple copies of the same work is a bad thing. This is typically done by researchers to boost their paper count (+ a bit of self-citation), and can make a hypothesis seem better supported than it is.
So only dodgy journals will re-publish work that has been published elsewhere.
I fully agree with the author. The hoops that AAAS makes you jump through are ridiculous and make me kind of sad. It is worth noting that this particular manuscript is easy to access with a google scholar search: http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=Deinococcus+radiodurans+o...
The real funny thing is the extensive use of the word "SCIENCE", meaning that is something precious, that's why it costs you so much to gain access to.
This is what throwaway accounts and BugMeNot are for... there are probably millions of sites if not more out there where you have to register free-of-charge to be able to download content; whenever I find one I check the usual account-sharing sites and if it's not there, then I create one and usually end up submitting it. FakeNameGenerator+AutoFill makes this really easy.
If you want to do it "100% legally", then this is probably not an option, but I see giving in to these unreasonable demands as a reason for them to impose even more draconian restrictions and data collection policies.
Yes I can see your point here. I had never heard of BugMeNot - looks very useful. However, as someone with offical roles in various open science organizations, I do not feel like I can use such options. Also - I want to highlight the sillyness of some groups like AAAS and trying to follow their rules makes that easier.
Jonathan is looking for legal ways to access the information.
His main point is that Science made it hard to access the data (but they did make it possible!) and his secondary point is the terms under which they made it possible were pretty silly (basically, opt-in to spam with no way to easily opt-out until you get the first spam and unsubscribe).
I dunno. Actually I think this is what victory feels like for open access publishing, as implemented by the incumbents (who have kicked and dragged their heels on this). It's not clear this is a battle worth fighting; scientists are used to working hard to get data, and if they really want to read a paper in Science (that is available for free), well, you just walked them through the process. It's onerous, but I suspect other battles (like being able to store and process all the documents on the science website via high-throughput means) are more important for the progress of science.
Sure - this is a small fight. I wrote the post not to get AAAS to provide access to such papers really. I wrote it to point out just how hard AAAS works to make stuff inaccessible. They are generally anti-sharing. And there is no way in hell they would let everyone access the full text of all papers. So it would be better for everyone if nobody published there.
In this case, as he's represented he's the author of the article in question and owner of its copyright, it really doesn't matter where he gets it from -- he isn't infringing his own copyright.
First: I agree with everything the author's written about the pain of accessing published research. While it's worlds better than the situation was when I was in school (a quarter century ago, before the World Wide Web and long before Google), where you had to actually go to a library and photocopy articles, far too often the experience is (1) find something cool and relevant, then (2) get stymied by a paywall or registration requirement.
There are a few ways through this, of varying levels of conformance with statutes.
Using Mailinator.com's free disposable mail (there are a number of other domains it uses as well -- the primary one is frequently blocked at registrations sites) is great. I'll generally use a password generator to create a random mailbox name. This does still require going through registration processes. http://mailinator.com
LibraryGenesis is another option. It offers an index of books and articles, largely scientific, with a pretty good success rate. http://libgen.org
The subreddit /r/scholar can be used for requesting specific articles, again aimed at research. I've found it quite helpful. http://reddit.com/r/scholar
Google Scholar and Google Search are pretty good at turning up articles, though the format in which they're made available is often miserable. In particular, Google's online article reader is pants -- a tremendous disappointment considering the source. And frequently full text isn't available.
The Internet Archive / Archive.org is another site which frequently has full text of documents available, including, ironically, many sourced by Google and the result of its wholesale scanning projects. And unlike Google's reader, the Internet Archive's BookReader is wonderful (I've gushed over it before on HN). Frequently PDF and ASCII text are also available.
For older works, there may be a Project Gutenberg copy, though its archive is generally markedly smaller than TIA's.
There are a few tools for reporting instances in which you've found access to information denied. I don't have references offhand, but recall a Chrome browser plugin which was publicized a few months back for this purpose.
"People are denied access to research hidden behind paywalls every day. This problem is invisible, but it slows innovation, kills curiosity and harms patients. This is an indictment of the current system. Open Access has given us the solution to this problem by allowing everyone to read and re-use research. We created the Open Access Button to track the impact of paywalls and help you get access to the research you need. By using the button you’ll help show the impact of this problem, drive awareness of the issue, and help change the system. Furthermore, the Open Access Button has several ways of helping you get access to the research you need right now."
