[achow]

More details at Washington Univ' site: https://medicine.wustl.edu/news/neurons-help-flush-waste-out...

Could not find any free access to the paper, even though the Univ' says "This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH); the BJC Investigators Program at Washington University; and the Neuroscience Innovation Foundation."

These kind of grant funded research should be accessible at the least from the Univ' websites.

[_yb2s]

All NIH funded research is freely open access by law.

In this case it seems the authors didn’t pay the (crazy expensive) Nature open access fee. They will have to upload a free PDF to PubMed manually, but have up to a year to do so, and don’t seem to have done it yet.

[Aeolun]

Is Nature’s open access fee really that crazy? Last time I checked it was a few thousand dollars.

And it’s paid once, to make the whole thing open perpetually. It certainly seems better than having the people interested in reading it pay $30-40 each.

Of course, this is also based on the few times I’ve heard researchers talk about the ways they could spend their grant money. $2k to Nature sounds like a great deal by comparison.

Note: Worked for Nature in the past.

[_yb2s]

It’s over $12k, which seems insane, and is 5-10x what other journals charge.

These journals are a racket… volunteer editors, volunteer reviewers, and thousands for what amounts to PDF hosting… which they also charge every school and library in the world on the other end.

[hx8]

Yes, I wouldn't expect someone to pay a few thousand dollars to Nature when PubMed will do the same job for free. I think the role of academic journals is decreasing as open and tech-savvy solutions to information sharing and screening are being deployed.

[Aeolun]

Depends, PubMed will happily take any article. I know for a fact that Nature does it’s own independent review of whatever is published (or did, years ago anyway). It’s not a guarantee of course, there’s been enough instances of review failure even in Nature, but it’s not the same as free access.

Ultimately what you are paying for is curation.

[JPLeRouzic]

More discussion about this paper on ALZ forum:

https://www.alzforum.org/news/research-news/do-sleep-rhythms...

[VagabundoP]

Checked and it was published through Nature:

Jiang-Xie, LF., Drieu, A., Bhasiin, K. et al. Neuronal dynamics direct cerebrospinal fluid perfusion and brain clearance. Nature 627, 157–164 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07108-6

Every Uni should have access through your library system.

[gapan]

I think the point was that every member of the public should have access to publicly funded research at least through the university's website, rather than at least everyone currently in universities should have access.

[baubino]

I agree but I also know (as a university employee) that the reason they don’t do this is because then they would have to pay for and manage the hosting of hundreds of thousands of articles. From the university’s perspective, managing and hosting articles is exactly what publishers do, so universities cede that work to publishers. What is needed is a public database of all publicly-funded research.

[achow]

How hard or expensive is it to embed a PDF link in the Univ news article. It maybe less harder and expensive than the stock image that they have used.

Stanford maintains an extensive catalog of research papers: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/in00000064276

[jimberlage]

At first I was like, “oh, that’s a reasonable perspective,” and then I thought about it more and it kinda isn’t?

When I buy a keyboard, the manufacturer doesn’t run a shipping company, so they use $x from the purchase price to subcontract shipping. (They tell me it’s separate at billing, but they don’t make me ring up DSL myself either.)

When I hire an electrician, they buy materials from Home Depot, so they use $x from the purchase price for materials. (They sometimes break down the bill into materials and labor, but they don’t make me drive to Home Depot myself and buy every part.)

When the public hires academics to do research, they have administrative overhead and have to hire a publisher, so they use $x from the grant for administrative overhead and…

Abdicate responsibility for the $y needed for publishing and pretend the public didn’t intend for part of the grant money to go to that??

[melagonster]

Publishers are not supported by government. and government only require publish.

[samtho]

You may have missed the point here.

OP was saying that publicly funded research needs to have, built in to its budget for the research, enough money to make the findings publicly available. The publishing mechanism is largely arbitrary here, only that it must be budgeted for.

[civilized]

Hosting is a long-solved problem. High-quality repositories have provided free, universally accessible document hosting to the academic world for decades.

The arXiv is a nonprofit organization run by Cornell that hosts preprints, and I wouldn't be surprised if it holds more stuff than all the for-profit publishers combined at this point. The barriers to uploading on the arXiv are very low - all you need is to be at a recognized academic institution or endorsed by someone who works for one.

Resources like arXiv have made official publishing largely superfluous for spreading knowledge in the parts of academia that understand and care about the value of spreading knowledge for free. Analogous archives exist for (at least) biology, medicine, psychology, and economics.

https://info.arxiv.org/about/index.html

[fragmede]

some sort of scientific hub, one might say

[mock-possum]

Sounds like a good cost for the government to subsidize.

[VagabundoP]

I agree publicly funded research should not be siloed in anyway and should be in the public domain.

[samstave]

AaronSwartz+1*

[lloeki]

Swartz. Schwartz is an actor.

[samstave]

>"Schwartz is an actor."

Such a beautiful, subtle pun.

[achow]

Yes, it was published through Nature.

But what stops Univ' site to have original research paper available for download? Nature magazine is just a distribution channel (they did not sponsor the research so should not have exclusive rights on it).

Left college long time ago; and do not have access to any library system.

[bayindirh]

Copyright Transfer Agreement. The moment you send the paper to Nature, you can only publish the draft you sent in. Unless you pay for publish, editorial costs are paid by selling access to that paper.

If you want to publish in an Open Access manner, you need to pay the costs. Or if your country wants to license it for Open Access, your country pays the costs.

[pca006132]

If I understand correctly, for most publishers you are allowed to host a copy on your personal web as well as the university library catalog?

[bayindirh]

AFAIK, this comes with distribution limitations like to your department and students in the university. There's an exception for arXiv generally for publishing intermediate revisions, but not the final one.

Elsevier has a nice summary at [0]. At the bottom there's "Publicly share the final published article". It's "YES" for Open Access and "NO" for subscription (classical) model. There's a rather detailed "Scholarly Share" which allows sharing with researchers, but not to any researcher, as I aforementioned on top.

[0]: https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies-and-standards/copyri...

[pca006132]

Never knew this before! Thanks for sharing.

[achow]

The final draft that was sent is good enough, maybe all that one needs.

[bayindirh]

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. In my case, the edited versions of (my) paper had more experiments, refined images and was more complete.

The paper was not bad to begin with, but the edited/revised version painted a more complete picture which shouldn't be possible without a set of external reviewers.

[SturgeonsLaw]

If you email the authors they might be happy to send you a copy - scientists tend to be in favour of the free exchange of information, there's no restriction on them sharing their paper if they choose to, and they don't get royalties from journal subscriptions so they have no vested interest in paywalling their research

[bayindirh]

Not all of them. I sent a couple of such mails, to only get back the freely available summary PDFs back. Even with the same checksum with the ones on the web.

[0xEF]

True, but I'd say it's still worth the email asking. I used to work in the mental health field requested paywalled research papers on cognitive and developmental disabilities pretty regularly, and about 80% of the people I contacted sent the paper to me without much question.

The more we all do it, the more expected the practice becomes and with any luck, these money-grubbing journals will take note and start offering copies at a minimal fee or time-limited access.

[bayindirh]

Of course. I'm a big proponent of Open Access. OTOH, Elsevier seems to give 50 days of Open Access via share links. I didn't know that.

I was away from academic arena for some time. Looks like I'll be returning soon-ish.

[cj]

Yep. My dog was part of a study at UC Davis. All I was able to get was an abstract.