Sciencemadness Discussion Board

How many research papers are freely available? - August 01, 2011

The WiZard is In - 4-8-2011 at 16:46

Nature Newsblog

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/08/how_many_research_paper...

KemiRockarFett - 8-8-2011 at 05:31

As long as a lot of reserach is payed for with tax money also the result/papers must be public for free.

solo - 8-8-2011 at 08:56

....i feel information should be free to all that want to learn...not just to those privileged with funds....my commitment to access and give information to those that need it, my small grain towards that end.....solo

Nicodem - 8-8-2011 at 12:48

Thank you solo. I think we all noticed your devote commitment to this idea and your generosity. It is much appreciated.

dann2 - 8-8-2011 at 12:58


I'll second that!

Fusionfire - 8-8-2011 at 15:00

It pissed me off when I published papers in journals that when I left the university, I had (in theory, if I didn't have a copy myself) to pay to read my own articles.

And it also pisses me off that I had to sign over the copyright for my work to the publishers, they charge money for people to read my research, they paid $0 to fund the research and they pay $0 to the peer reviewers to read the paper.

Thieves.

The WiZard is In - 8-8-2011 at 15:15

Quote: Originally posted by Fusionfire  
It pissed me off when I published papers in journals that when I left the university, I had (in theory, if I didn't have a copy myself) to pay to read my own articles.

And it also pisses me off that I had to sign over the copyright for my work to the publishers, they charge money for people to read my research, they paid $0 to fund the research and they pay $0 to the peer reviewers to read the paper.

Thieves.



Well thing can be/have been better-worse.

Some journals supplied authors with x-number of copies
of their paper, others had Page charges i.e.,
they charged you to publish your paper... granted
some grants would pay for this. I lack current knowledge.

watson.fawkes - 8-8-2011 at 19:31

The Public Library of Science journals have a very straightforward monetary model. The author pays an up-front fee, and PLoS provides open access forever. Here's their page on publication fees.

Nicodem - 8-8-2011 at 21:07

Usualy once you start working in a certain field of science you get jobs where VPN access to some major or even most publishers is somehow provided by the employer, or in the case of a job in the industry, you are usually limited to the access literature only from the computers at the job (for "security reasons"). Still, I fully share the sentiment Fusionfire describes. It is undignifying not being allowed to access your own articles, but so it is knowing that they are unaccessible to all of those who are not given access by some institution access, which means nearly 7 billion of people.
Quote: Originally posted by The WiZard is In  
Well thing can be/have been better-worse.

Some journals supplied authors with x-number of copies
of their paper, others had Page charges i.e.,
they charged you to publish your paper... granted
some grants would pay for this. I lack current knowledge.

I'm afraid it still remains just like you describe it. I don't see the PLOS system as a solution. Charging money to the authors so they are allowed to publish their work is also humiliating. Nevertheless, the PLOS journals are having their impact factor going up at an incredible rate and this will eventually force the academic researchers, who depend on these factors like junkies on their junk, to forget about the humiliation and just force their institutions to pay the bill. It is still a profit based enterprise and as such it can not bring any good. Scientific publishers should have their expenses be paid from the money of the tax payers and a supervising board should make sure their never ever work for profit.

Fusionfire - 8-8-2011 at 23:09

Quote: Originally posted by Nicodem  
Usualy once you start working in a certain field of science you get jobs where VPN access to some major or even most publishers is somehow provided by the employer, or in the case of a job in the industry, you are usually limited to the access literature only from the computers at the job (for "security reasons"). Still, I fully share the sentiment Fusionfire describes.


Thanks. When I was working at a large defence company as a research engineer there they have dismal access to journals. They only had access to a handful of Elsevier-only journals that had a high % of papers relevant to defence work, and even that only papers in the last 5 years or so.

If you want to read a paper that they don't have a subscription to, you have to fill out a form, find a project number to charge the expense to, wait for approval from accounts and your manager, ad nauseum. Bear in mind this happens while the project clock is ticking. It also must be repeated for every non-subscribed paper.

So I would say the people who really have some notable freedom accessing journals are those in academia because of the many research interests and faculties. Commercial institutions with specific research interests don't count.
Quote:

It is undignifying not being allowed to access your own articles, but so it is knowing that they are unaccessible to all of those who are not given access by some institution access, which means nearly 7 billion of people.


The world will be a better place if those publishing houses didn't exist and 7 billion people had free access to journals.

Who knows we might have had a cure for cancer by now.
Quote:
Some journals supplied authors with x-number of copies
of their paper, others had Page charges i.e.,
they charged you to publish your paper... granted
some grants would pay for this. I lack current knowledge.


I was told the electronic B&W versions are free (God forbid I lose the pdf!). If I wanted to have physical B&W or colour copies I would have to pay for them.
Quote:

I'm afraid it still remains just like you describe it. I don't see the PLOS system as a solution. Charging money to the authors so they are allowed to publish their work is also humiliating. Nevertheless, the PLOS journals are having their impact factor going up at an incredible rate and this will eventually force the academic researchers, who depend on these factors like junkies on their junk, to forget about the humiliation and just force their institutions to pay the bill. It is still a profit based enterprise and as such it can not bring any good. Scientific publishers should have their expenses be paid from the money of the tax payers and a supervising board should make sure their never ever work for profit.


Or these days of the WWW universities/research institutes could just self-publish after an internal peer review process.

Seriously I don't see why we need publishers. They are a wholly unnecessary cartel/monopoly. Their existence is justified by some as being necessary for peer review and publishing quality but as they pay their peer reviewers nothing and I have seen some atrocious papers or mistakes in published ones, people could find their own peer reviewers, pay them £10 and still do a better job than them!

[Edited on 9-8-2011 by Fusionfire]

watson.fawkes - 9-8-2011 at 04:19

Quote: Originally posted by Nicodem  
I don't see the PLOS system as a solution. Charging money to the authors so they are allowed to publish their work is also humiliating. Nevertheless, the PLOS journals are having their impact factor going up at an incredible rate and this will eventually force the academic researchers, who depend on these factors like junkies on their junk, to forget about the humiliation and just force their institutions to pay the bill. It is still a profit based enterprise and as such it can not bring any good.
As a correction, PLoS is a tax-exempt non-profit. It's exactly the right form of organization for an open access publisher, because it has all the same operational requirements as any other charity.

Humiliating? I don't see publication fees as any more humiliating than groveling for money, a.k.a. the grant proposal. Given just how much research is grant-funded, the shortest path to improving open access is simply to require, as a condition of the grant, that any publications that result from grant-funded research be open access. That would change things instantly. It's not like the grant money isn't plentiful enough to cover the publication fees.

Another issue is simply cost accounting in academic institutions. The budget for journal acquisition is typically overhead, not tied to any particular academic department. The institution typically takes a hefty cut of grant money. They could improve the situation simply by paying publication fees out of that cut, so that there was no net change to department and researcher allocations.

All this said, paying for publication has the unfortunate incentive to the journal publisher to lower standards to seek increased revenue. This incentive is present even for non-profits. This problem, however, is a second-order effect that would have to be addressed after the higher good of open access is achieved.

Open Access

The WiZard is In - 13-8-2011 at 10:29

Extracted from:—

Digitizing the Coin of the Realm
Electronic publication has transformed the culture of scientific
communication
Francis L. Macrina
American Scientist September-October 2011
http://tinyurl.com/Am-Scientist-Open-Access



Access for All

Earlier in this essay, I discussed online publication of articles as a service provided by publishers to complement the printed versions of their journals. This form of electronic publication still requires users to have a subscription or an institutional site license to access online articles. But a second, slower-growing form of publishing, which also began in the 1990s, lets readers access online articles for free. The business model for such publications depends on the relatively low cost of distributing digitally encoded articles. And the expenses of doing so are borne by the authors themselves or by their academic institutions or funding agencies.

At a meeting in 2003, a group of scientists, librarians and publishers wrote a document now commonly known as the “Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing,” which has been widely embraced among open access (OA) publishers. The statement lays out two conditions that define OA publication. First, it grants “to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access” to the published work, as well as a license to “copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly,” to distribute derivative works based on the original and to make a few copies for personal use. Second, it promises that the work will be deposited in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution or other “well-established organization” that supports open access and long-term archiving. In practice, this definition has been widely adopted, with individual variations among publishers.

Although it had a slower start than subscription-based online publishing, the OA model is now viable and growing. A website called The Directory of Open Access Journals reported the existence of 6,671 OA journals in all scholarly fields at the end of June 2011. And in a study published this year in the OA journal PLoS ONE, Mikael Laakso and colleagues reviewed 16 years of OA publishing, from 1993 to 2009. They report that the number of such journals grew 18 percent per year, while the total number of scholarly journals grew only 3.5 percent per year. The numbers of OA journals and articles show impressive growth curves over the time frame. But despite the increase, these articles accounted for only about 8 percent of all scholarly papers published in 2009.

Other studies have shown that researchers are well aware of OA journals and increasingly publish their work in them. Perceived advantages include free accessibility to users and the ability to reach a wide readership. The validity of criticisms, such as diminished prestige and lower peer-review quality, remains unresolved. The acceptance of OA publishing and the success of the enterprise may be best expressed by the fact that PLoS ONE published 6,749 papers in 2010, making it the world’s largest journal that year. Today, free access is part of the culture of scientific publication. But it will be interesting to follow the trends as new publishers enter the marketplace and authors develop a better sense of the desirability (or undesirability) of publishing in OA journals.

OA publication is often referred to as an “author pays” model, in contrast to the alternative, in which the user pays a fee to gain access. Typically, authors have always paid to publish their work. In 1991, authors often spent several hundred dollars on page charges and reprint fees for a single paper. But for OA publication, the author pays even more. These journals charge an article-processing fee that can range from about $1,000 to several thousand dollars, depending on the journal. If you publish in a subscription-based journal that distributes articles in print and online, and also offers an OA option, you rack up additional fees. Today, page charges are $50 to $100 per page, which would get you into print and online and make your paper accessible to journal subscribers. Then, you might want to publish supplemental information on the journal’s website, for a surcharge of up to several hundred dollars. Finally, you might decide to make your article freely available from the moment it appears online, a decision that may cost you several hundred to thousands of dollars more. Today, as in the past, most journals waive or reduce page charges or OA fees if the author demonstrates that he or she cannot afford them.

Although OA journal publishing is the dominant means for putting scientific results into the public domain, other strategies do exist—and all are facilitated by online technology. Journal articles may be deposited into any of several public-domain digital archives such as PubMedCentral. Subscription-based journals may allow authors to pay an extra fee to make their papers freely available online. Finally, researchers may post OA manuscripts on non-commercial servers such as arXiv.org, or on personal or institutional websites.

Pondering the Power of Pixels

For more than 20 years, we have witnessed the profound effects of digital technology on scholarly publication. Changes in logistics and culture have been diverse and numerous. But I would argue that today, open access is the central issue in the marriage of publication to the pixel. It may be growing too fast for some and not fast enough for others, but it is growing nonetheless. I believe it is here to stay. It takes multiple forms, from journals that exclusively practice free-to-user availability, to individual investigators who maintain online libraries of their own published work. Will one model dominate over time? Are there more models to come? If the past 20 years are any predictor, the interplay of imagination, market forces and evolving digital technology will continue to change the publication landscape.

In the meantime, the scholarly community has a role to play in the development of the OA movement. That community includes authors, publishers, scientific societies, librarians and computer scientists. OA journal publishing should be subjected to ongoing evaluation to measure its impact, to address problems and to improve the platform for all its users. There should be transparent assessment of performance metrics such as article processing times, citations, peer-review quality and the costs to those involved.

Once such evaluations have been performed, they may help answer a growing host of questions: Is a goal of 100 percent open access reasonable or desirable? Should researchers embrace some forms of OA publication and not others? What about server space, backup and security issues specific to online-only journals? As we move toward a more OA culture, what role do—and should—printed journals have? Should there be more proactive education about OA publication? Do we need to be more forward-thinking about who should pay for publication costs? Many research funding agencies do pay grantees’ publication fees, but with OA publishing, the budget may have to increase. Should our institutions step up to the plate with their checkbooks? To gain maximum effect, the analyses that address these questions should be made by parties devoid of conflict of interest, and—in the spirit of open access—the results should be placed in the public domain.