As they say, it all comes down to huge swathes of government and nonprofit work being locked behind a paywall. I say fuck Lexis as well, but I'm not as familiar with the value or "value" that they add.
I 100% agree, research is government-sponsored, peer-review is done for free, so what is that exactly they are charging $30/pop for?
The thing I can't figure out where is the hell all the money goes. The overhead can't be that high, can it? Edit: no way, Elsevier is for profit and handles this shit? Christ.
Problem with scientific publication is that reward system is decoupled from costs. Scientists who publish research have unlimited access to the system that they don't have to personally pay for, yet their main reward - authoring a peer-reviewed publication in a prestigious journal, comes from these guys. The fact that these guys managed to insert themselves as completely unnecessary middleman is a leftover from pre-Internet days where journals were actually paper publications that required publication infrastructure.
Lexis and Westlaw, at least with respect to legal material, DO add a lot of value by writing headnotes that highlight important points, etc. But cases without all that value-added material ought to be easier to get hold of. There's a movement afoot to liberate federal court documents from the fee-based court-run PACER system as well.
Canada has the increasingly amazing CanLII, a searchable database including all reported cases from around 2000 to the present, and some reported cases stretching back far further (chiefly the Supreme Court of Canada judgments). It is not a complete replacement for Lexis or Westlaw in that it does not have all of the same headnotes and commentary, but it is often an effective alternative.
Very interesting article. I'll have to pass it around my department. Was not surprised to see biology at the bottom for fields to benefit from openness, but the benefits are still tremendous even then. There's a certain amount of give and take that needs to happen for journals to remain economically viable, but it's gotten really fucking stupid.
Maybe they could get around to making PACER not a heaping pile of shit first, but that would be nice.
All California cases are available free on the internet (completely w/o headnotes or other editorial enhancements) but apparently that's unusual. You can get most of what IS available for fed and states on Google Scholar. Re: PACER, we had an interesting series of events at my law library a few years ago. The Federal Judiciary decided to run a pilot program giving the public free access to PACER at 16 law libraries around the country, and we were selected. A few months into the pilot program, it was abruptly cancelled, and we were informed that we (along with a couple other libraries) had been the site of a massive downloading effort by someone or other. Turns out it was someone working with Carl Malamud of public.resource.org (an enthusiastic advocate of open access to the laws who puts a ton of stuff up on his site, some of which the publishers claim is under copyright). When the pilot program started up, he encouraged people to visit the relevant libraries and download as much of PACER as they could onto their thumb drives, then upload it to his site. Here's an article about his PACER efforts: http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2008/12/open_pacer?currentPage=all I was sad that the pilot program had to end, but have to admire the impulse. Free the documents and Justia and other services will make it much easier to search too :)
Is Malamud the RECAP guy? Sounds like the same program. Another area that needs to be opened up is building codes and fire codes. These private outfits like the International Code Council develop building codes, and then local governments adopt them as law. But unlike the rest of the city's code, the building code can't be published online for easy access. Why? The ICC's copyright. That's bullshit. Once something is adopted as law, it's in the public domain. There needs to be a LOT of litigation over that. EDIT: Oops, I'm a little behind. Seems the 5th Circuit held in 2002 that codes adopted as law lose their copyright protection. As a result, Public Resource has a buttload of building and fire codes.
He's involved in RECAP but it is a slightly different program (attorneys voluntarily submit docs they have paid for). The 5th Circuit did hold that, and Malamud is very pleased to remind everyone of it, but the other jurisdictions haven't. Cal. has stopped fussing with him about it, though, last I heard. Also, no doubt because of him, you can now get the building code as adopted by Cal and several other states free online via the ICC, albeit in a horribly un-useful format. http://publicecodes.citation.com/st/
If nothing is done to contain this, it all but makes certain that paywalled journals will be history. This is not neccessary good thing because it avoides addressing much bigger issue - current peer-review process failing scientific community. Having three random dudes reading over your paper without access to your data or lab is not sufficient to guarantee integrity of publication. We need to start publishing a lot more data that currently is the standard - enough so anyone could verify your results. This is the only way to guarantee scientific integrity in the age of aggregated data analysis. Here is what I'd do if I were CEO of one of the journals (PM me with 7-figure salary offer if you like what you are reading, if I like the number I will help you): 1. Hire PR company to start a stink about "scientific dishonesty" - the reason these journals exist is because they collude with scientists to publish lots of junk science to make it easier to survive "publish or perish". 2. "Free" articles older than 5 years - people outside of the field don't really care about "cutting edge". This will all but remove public support from this cause. 3. Start a substantial grant to verify published work, call it "scientific integrity grant" and promise annual % of profits to be donated to this fund. Promise guaranteed publications to studies that debunk existing publications. 4. Laugh all the way to the bank while old profit model survives while scientists tear each other apart
It chokes the shit out of civic discourse. How many discussions have we had here that bumped into a paywalled journal article or study? Irksome in the extreme.
I know it's an offer only a few people have taken me up on, but I'm more than happy to use the magic of Zotero to circumvent this issue of access. Granted it's a shitty answer since filtering down the studies is best done firsthand, but it's better than relying on abstracts and summaries.
Scholarly Kitchen interviews Cameron Neylon of the Public Library of Science on opening up scientific publishing and networking scientists. His ideas sound good to me, insofar as I understand what he's talking about!
It seems the British government is going to take time off from scandal generation to totally revolutionize access to research. As noted in the article, it's 6% of research output worldwide, but in terms of what it represents in leadership for an age where we are obsessed with ownership and control of information for short-term profit, well, it's a big deal. Let's see if some of that bold science thinking President Obama trolled us with crops up again.
I can't remember their names, but I am certain I remember a good few researchers who published their work with a copyleft doctrine when I was doing my six months undergrad research. This was in the mangement and marketing field so a lot of their work would have been funded by the business they went into. But some of the leaders of the movement (and they were highly recognised guys) maintained the attitude that anyone should have access to their research, and published it freely on their own personal websites. They figured that the journals they published to couldn't do without them (the big guys were correct, when they published the journals ran for them.) And the tried to negotiate into their book deals that they could publish the text for, but the indexed, etc. work would stay with the publisher for X years. I guess the baseline of it went down to they believed a "dying" model of universities paying tens of thousands for access to broad journal databases would support them. While students and interested individuals could have the ease of access of just checking out their website for their papers and their older and unedited books. I still lament when my university shut down my database access (about two years after I finished.) It was great to just go on a browse of what interested me and was going on. Even going through some of the bigger journals, reading the abstracts and clicking through on the stuff that interested me. Lizard_King I'm not too sure what your Zotero offer is, but I would like to hear more if you're offering what I'm thinking of. (I looked up the service and I'm not quite sure if it's the actual journal access or if it's an adanced search method.)
He's offering to give you access to any journal article he has access to, mostly via JSTOR, and hook you up through Zotero. As my school's system still thinks I'm a grad student even though I dropped out, I can offer the same service, although I have to figure out Zotero first.
And anyway, math, physics, and computer science are way ahead of everyone else, as most papers get published free-to-everyone via arxiv.org.
The Episciences Project: Still a lot of "perhaps" but in principle this doesn't seem like anything more than what the internet should have made feasible years ago without the paywalls and their lawyers setting up shop early.
MIT should deal with its role in the Aaron Swartz prosecution by stepping up its efforts on behalf of breaking down paywalls.
White House Directs Open Access For Federally Funded Research...after a year. ...and that's how you know it's not much good. But I guess it's a start.
Grabbed this from a post above - passing along possible career change...or maybe just a dammed job? http://www.canlii.ca/en/blog/index....-Manager-CanLII-content-and-partnerships.html If it's an old post, it's still a good sample job description to file for resume rewrites....
Sinij is in this thread. You should be ashamed of yourself. holy fuck I am judgmental and dry tonight not that kind of dry you assholes haha now you're thinking about it also I'm a man* *...i think i should go to sleep
I should have known a thread like this existed ! Stupid of me. The big disadvantage of arxiv is that -at least to my knowledge- there is no peer review. Which at least to me makes it pretty much useless. As much as I like the idea, this is not the solution. But primarily I wanted to add some stuff I posted over in the Science thread in the past. From where I stand Open Access is finally starting to exert noticeable pressure on the traditional publishers, at least it seems like it. For example, the Nature Publishing Group is working with Frontiers (OA publishers) to collaborate on Open Access. Perhaps a reason might be that scientists themselves are getting active. I posted another example in the same thread - MPG, Wellcome Trust and Howard Hughes have funded their own Open Access life science journal, meaning to establish a realistic alternative to Nature or Science. Admittedly I am not sure if they can crack those two (unlikely), but this definitely exerts pressure - statistically, every third article in those two journals is published by senior authors belonging to one of the three bodies; the bill for publishing in the next five years will be paid in full by the three organizations, with no cost to the authors. Things are moving in the right direction, if slowly.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this yet, but not only does the public have to pay to see the research, scientists have to pay page fees to publish the research. I don't know how they're set, but my guess is "how much we can get away with." These fees are frequently pretty high given that the print edition is pretty much only bought by libraries and people with lots of disposable income, but you'd think that charging the universities that much money would at least prevent them from having to bleed a few hundred bucks here and there from our grants, too. Here someone tries to do some calculations about Elsevier, the Evil Empire of journal publication.
Let me add my help as well. If LK can't access a study, I can give it a shot. Send me the link, and I'll see what I can do.
I'd offer to help, but I'm almost dead certain that Lizard_King has access to the exact same articles I do, possibly better than I; because the last time I tried to grab my weeks readings off of EBSCOhost I got put into a queue for two weeks. Fuck you, EBSCOhost.
Aren't people aware of this thing called bittorent? Could be useful for distributing publications for free.
The point is finding a fair use-friendly option for sharing that is fully integrated into a web browser and allows you to sort, categorize, and later cite the papers in question. That's what Zotero currently provides, handily, so it's not a mechanical barrier. The problem lies with the default setting of most academic publications, which put content behind a paywall initially ensuring that abstracts, journalist's summaries, and worse are all that are available to the general public. This is a problem on one level because research and academia as a whole ought to serve the public first and foremost, on another because of the diverse ways tax dollars get used in research, and in a third way because scientists and scholars themselves are essentially putting out their expertise for free (and require an academic/business position that can foot the substantial bill for access themselves) in return for the "right" to share and review work in their field, all so that paywall companies like JSTOR can make a buck. Bittorrent doesn't solve any of those problems. It's fine for a distribution network once those are resolved, should larger files than usual be in play, but it's not really a solution to the problem this thread is addressing.
