[Ardit20]

Good luck with that. Barriers to professions - which includes access to research - is what keeps the professionals well paid and thus perhaps allow them to fund more research.

Isn't that infringement of copyrights by the way? Do you think it is fine too if I start distributing freely an application for which you have worked for years and decided to charge for?

[jonknee]

> Do you think it is fine too if I start distributing freely an application for which you have worked for years and decided to charge for?

Sure, as long as I developed the application with taxpayer money I think it would be fair game to have it freely distributed. From the article:

> The study was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health.

I wish the NIH and others would require free distribution for papers originating out of publicly funded research.

[joeyo]

They do. The catch is there is (up to) a 12 month lag.

http://publicaccess.nih.gov/

[Ardit20]

I think there is a difference between the substance of the content and its distribution. The way that the article can have any validity and authority is for the current time through a peer reviewed system which requires plenty of money to be upheld.

I like the system, with all its flaws. Why should you be free to cheat it? If you are poor and can not afford it, then fine, but if you do not value the knowledge sufficiently for a fiver or tenner, then maybe you should not gain it.

The thing is that this goes beyond a random user like you or me. It is not hard at all to see vast distribution of such articles on free websites. You only need to buy a subscription to the distributor, and then copy and paste and upload each and everyone of them. Then, the people who actually find it necessary to read such articles, which is quite different from a random viewer, and who are the actual people who support the system, would simply not need to provide the funding for the system, and thus the system either collapses, or it evolves stupendously fast.

I would rather give them their time. This is not music or film. This is knowledge. I would thus rather be conservative and give them the freedom to adapt and adopt to the new technology and innovate within their own space and time.

[jonknee]

Then there should be grant money set aside to cover peer review. I'd bet most of the subscribers are already doing so with public money in some form, it doesn't make sense to lock up all that information behind a pay wall.

[Ardit20]

Why should there be grant money set aside to cover peer review? Just ask yourself honestly and try to be unbiased, is that not a very selfish proposition?

This is only one article, amongst thousands of which we do not care of. We do not care of them because they have nothing to do with the field we have chosen to focus on, be that computer science, medicine, history, physics, law, or artificial intelligence. I would rather the money goes into research, than to provide some randomer with the pleasure of reading something they hardly can understand anyway.

I did not read the peer reviewed journal, I do not care to read it, I know little about medicine besides what I was taught in school. The terminology used is different, one word contains entire concepts, there is an entirely different way of thinking in that field, and frankly, it adds no value to me personally. If it did and I could afford it, I would buy it. £30 is what one spends on a Saturday night!

Now if we wished to live in a paranoid world where we do not trust the experts in their field and wish to validate everything our self, then that is a personal choice of perspective.

One can well choose to spend his entire life to learn of every field in this earth. Most people, if not the vast majority of people, if not 99% of people, sooner or later, focus on one field, and perhaps focus further on that field, especially if such field is medicine, or computer science, or law. That is how we work, that is the best system we have found of operating.

I personally do not see anything wrong with the way the system currently works, not wrong in such a way as to justify throwing it out entirely. If you are a doctor, you subscribe, if you are not, then buy the one article you want to read, if you do not want to buy it, then you do not need it.

[jonknee]

> Why should there be grant money set aside to cover peer review? Just ask yourself honestly and try to be unbiased, is that not a very selfish proposition?

Why should there be grant money set aside to cover research?

I don't think I'm alone in finding that it's frustrating to have tax payer funded research be hidden behind paywalls that other tax payer funded institutions can access but the general public cannot. We're paying for both sides and not getting the goods.

[Ardit20]

Those who are interested in the goods however, subsidise those goods. You, or the tax paying public is not interested in those goods, but only the results. Just bare in mind this is only one article. There are thousands of other articles which you personally, let alone the tax paying public cares nothing of.

Knowledge is useful only to those who know how to make use of it.

But my opinion is not wanted, thus, you have your opinion and hold it dearly beside any questions of reason or logics because perhaps I should say if you had such understanding then you would have the liberty to suggest a better system.

[aphyr]

Why should there be grant money set aside to cover peer review?

Because we're already paying for it in journal subscriptions , memberships, and publication fees paid by public institutions. We might as well pay something other than a for-profit organization. Elsevier, for example, does something like $600 million in pre-tax profit per year.

That profit comes, in part, from your tax dollars via research grants and public education funding.

[sprout]

Most researchers haven't really chosen to charge for their papers. It's the only way to get published in the journals, and it's based on an old scarcity where the distribution of quality journals was a difficult task. Now a social network of scientists could handle it for almost nothing. Barriers to research do nothing but make life difficult for poor college students.

See http://arxiv.org.

[ericd]

There's still a scarcity of validation via reputation that is hard to get rid of.

[Ardit20]

Common. You probably are a college student, or the original poster is, or both were thus know full well that you get free access to the journals you need when you are a student.

A journal has editors, some choose to have their journals in print which requires much money, and some journals have sub editors, and assistant editors, and chief editors, and a whole infrastructure which demands much money to be upheld.

If you do not pay for it, well not you precisely, but the professionals who work in that field, then the funds would be taken either away from research or from students. I would rather someone who is in their thirties, and thus able to afford merely £10 for an article, or £30 for a monthly subscription, or however much it is, pay for it, than the students, amongst whom may be many poor ones and amongst whom almost inevitably the next Einstein come from.

There are problems with the system for certain. Personally I think such research should not be beyond a firewall for those who can not afford to pay for it. There is no reason that those who can should not, for if they do not, then the poor will pay.

[sprout]

>Common. You probably are a college student, or the original poster is, or both were thus know full well that you get free access to the journals you need when you are a student.

That's entirely false. If there was a single distribution point that charged a nominal fee, that would be one thing, but to do any significant research you need at least 5 such £30 monthly subscriptions, and no school subscribes to all journals a student might want.

>If you do not pay for it, well not you precisely, but the professionals who work in that field, then the funds would be taken either away from research or from students.

I'd like to meet the professionals that buy these papers. I get the distinct impression it's mostly professors, students, and universities paying these outrageous fees.

Personally, I'm a professional now and if I needed a paper relevant to my work I would buy it. But I don't need it. Very few professionals need any sort of academic papers, especially in CS. We've got the whole Internet, from Wikipedia to Github to this very site to get information about trends, and we offer it for free because we know that hiding information is more trouble than it's worth (and it's much easier for us to work when those around us freely share.)

[maxawaytoolong]

no school subscribes to all journals a student might want.

I went to a crappy (but huge) state university and they did indeed subscribe to ALL of the journals. My family has a good number of academics and this seems to be the case at any large university, regardless of quality.

[sprout]

I went to a ~3000 student private liberal arts college and we subscribed to a handful. 90% of what I needed was out of reach. I suspect there are some economies of scale, but those economies are completely artificial; there's no reason the per-student rate should be different for a small college than a large one.

Well, I suppose there is one: most of the cost is administrative overhead in actually collecting the bill, so it's easier if you've got one bill for 40k as opposed to one bill for 3k

[Ardit20]

What you needed, not the students.

[Ardit20]

This should perhaps be my last comment on this.

On your first point. I was a student and during that time I had access to all the papers I needed, sufficient papers to get the top grades.

Second, I do not know what profession you are in, computer science is very different from medicine. To start with, the latter requires actual physical stuff, you know, people you can experiment with, or monkeys, and substances, like bleach, and an actual physical space, rather than simply a computer and some time.

I understand that my opinion is in the minority. I understand too that most of you bright smart angels are trying to find loopholes in my reasoning or arguments. I am not however pleased at all with having the entire people of reason and intelligence set against like leaches.

This is a discussion. Not of an adversarial kind, but of a collaborative nature, where people of reason and intelligence try to arrive at a conclusion, rather than win one over. If I gather this wrong, then that is my bad. My intention however was to suggest as to how things taking in consideration practical matters, matters of principle, matters of a complex nature and combined by my own self, derives at simply copying a journal article and putting it on your web page to be no different than my buying the application you sell and putting it on my web page for free for all others to use as they please.

If reason is dead in this place and what counts is the "I am right", then that is fine.

Long Live Liberty of Choice.

[sprout]

>On your first point. I was a student and during that time I had access to all the papers I needed, sufficent papers to get the top grades.

Where did you go to school? From my experience yours is most atypical.

I don't sell applications. I configure and make slight modifications to free applications, or applications my employer pays for (and in my experience the ones that charge have negative value from my perspective, while the free ones save me hours of time.) So feel free to copy my code and documentation and put it all online. Those that aren't available online are only closed because I felt my clients/employers wouldn't appreciate their free availability. You would be giving me a great 'out' to give back to the community.

But yes, reason has little purchase in this place. The community has very strong biases and refuses to give time to opposition.

That said, long live liberty.

[Ardit20]

"But yes, reason has little purchase in this place. The community has very strong biases and refuses to give time to opposition."

What exactly do you mean?

[aphyr]

(I really wanted to write a reasoned rebuttal, but the more I read your posts here the less I can figure out exactly what you've intended to say. Maybe some of this disagreement is due to a misunderstanding over writing.)

There are quite literally thousands of relevant journals for a college to subscribe to, and institutional access is fantastically expensive. In fact, the cost of journal access here in the US has expanded year over year far faster than inflation or any other information resource, and now consumes the majority of library budgets at many colleges.

That "free access" you were talking about for students? Physical Review alone runs from $17,000 to $32,000 annually. Now imagine maintaining a few hundred of those subscriptions.

On the other side of things, I have published in Physical Review Letters, and was disillusioned with the editorial/peer review process. You're hopelessly constrained for length, but asked to remove key sentences while expanding abbreviations. Because it's extremely difficult to explain your work in such a short space, your reviewers can focus on details you know deserve explanation but simply can't include for brevity--or worse, misunderstand your research entirely.

Let's face it: this is only a problem for dead-tree publishers. We could double the page limits for online articles at negligible cost, and I would argue, decreased difficulty for reviewers and referees.

Some people have raised more political concerns about the review process, but I don't understand those as fully.

[edit] I should make it clear that I greatly value the work being done by APS and journals in organizing, qualifying, and sharing high-value correspondence. I simply believe there may be a space for open-access journals as well.

[c1sc0]

I'm sorry, but there is no excuse whatsoever for that old bloated system for distribution to continue to exist. Sure, editors have value, sure, peer review should be rewarded. But trying to create artificial scarcity by bringing an outdated distribution model to the online world doesn't make sense. Any pdf is just a few hops away on most social networks anyway, so it's not like their paywalls are stopping anyone.

[Ardit20]

"old bloated system"

You mean the same one that google uses for, amongst other things, to measure authority?

I am fine with kicking the old system into oblivion. I am not fine with doing so before suggesting a new system however. I simply do not see how, in this chaotic internet where everyone has an opinion and is able to communicate it to the entire world, we can differentiate between objective solid stuff, and mere speculation.

If we are for freedom, then lets us have such freedom. Let us not frown at wikileaks if they publish deep and damaging secrets, let us not be defensive when our own content is concerned and copied, let us so too resist any attempts of the real law, say the law of defamation to apply to the internet, let us be cool with bittorrent and the way it distributes freely our content.

If that is the internet we wish, then fine, let us be the pioneers and disrupt all older notions.

If the above is extreme however, then let us be impartial and judge where the line ought to be not from a selfish perspective, not from an emotional or ideological perspective, but from a rational, detached, without favour or fear perspective.

That is the choice of our generation, but I submit, we can have only one of them. We can not be hypocrites when our own interests are concerned and guard them ferociously, yet fight to undermine the interests of others.

[akshayubhat]

     Good luck with that. Barriers to professions - which includes access to research - is what keeps the professionals well paid and thus perhaps allow them to fund more research.

>> No, Public interest in research is what keeps funding higher.

     Isn't that infringement of copyrights by the way? Do you think it is fine too if I start distributing freely an application for which you have worked for years and decided to charge for?

>> Researchers publishing papers dont earn a penny, the only thing that they get is free (no charge to researcher) dissemination. In fact a lot of researchers post a free version on there own web site.

I have published two papers in journal published by American Chemical Society and authors are allowed to put up pre-publication / non edited copy of their papers on their own website. ACS also provides a link from which upto 50 visitors can download the authors paper for free in first year and there is no limit after first year.

E.g. http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/download.pl?ie0704647/P8Lu is free link to my first paper, the article is behind the firewall but if you use above link, you can get it for free.