[wmf]

If you can't read the literature because it's behind a paywall that you can't afford, it's very likely that any papers you write will be rejected for poor form, lack of proper citations, and possibly being entirely redundant. I think there are much bigger problems trying to perform research outside "the system", but access to the literature is an issue.

[anologwintermut]

Most research papers are findable via Google. Authors post them online. The better argument for open access is merely that universities shouldn't be paying for or private parties profiting from providing access to publicly funded research

Often times, the knowledge guild is actually never put down on paper. You, sadly, need to be at a university where people are working on what you want to be able to do anything. Papers are just waypoints.

[vlasev]

It's often such a PITA to find free research papers if you don't have access to the paid journals. If it's just one paper, it's not such a big issue. The trouble is one of scale. A researcher usually puts a lot of time into looking for all the references and papers to read. If this researcher doesn't have direct free access to these papers and has to look them up on google every time, this increases the overhead significantly. We're talking about dozens of papers just to get started well on a topic.

Here's an example. When I did math research last summer at my university, I looked at 16 papers. It took a while to gather these even with my university account with which I obtained the articles for free. If I had to google every single article, it would have taken me much more time - at least double if not triple the time.

[Someone]

Devils's advocate: if no "private parties profiting from providing access to publicly funded research" should exist, shouldn't you be opposed to "Most research papers are findable via Google.", too? Google is making profits from publicly fundable research, too.

IMO, there is nothing wrong with companies making a profit from providing access to publicly funded research; the only problems are lack of competition and (IMO consequently) profit margins that society finds unjust.

The former, I think, is being settled. More and more new research is effectively open access. The latter, then, will follow.

And to your second point: there used to be companies that had university-like environments where short-time profits do not rule the day (AT&T, Xerox, Philips Natlab, Apple's ATG). Nowadays, Google and Microsoft Research still have similar groups.

[dumitrue]

Sure, but it does depend on the field. In my field (Machine Learning) most (if not all) papers are essentially available online for free (mostly because of very strong actions like http://jmlr.org/statement.html). There might be some obscure papers on perceptrons from the 70s which are behind paywalls, but you are very unlikely to need them. To a somewhat smaller extent, this is true of most computer science and math.

Now, if you're doing research in biology, then this is a bigger problem. Pubmed is great, especially when you get access to freely available papers, but open access is not the norm yet. The tide is turning though, and I think most (all?) NIH-funded research is supposed to be open access.

However, if you're doing research in biology, not having a PhD is not really the main issue -- you need a lab, money, equipment, mice etc. There's no AWS for biology, sadly, though in fairness it would be a need idea! :)

[tjr]

(Not necessarily directed at wmf...)

In a lot of HN conversations pertaining to computer science research, it appears to me that a lot of folks equate doing computer science research with publishing papers.

I suppose that if your job is to work as a researcher, or as a grad student, or as a professor, perhaps publishing papers is very important.

But in the context of doing research independently (as this subthread seems to be about), why should we care? Isn't the more fundamental point of computer science research to develop new software systems that either do something totally innovative, or improve upon previous systems in novel ways?

[dumitrue]

Sending a paper for review can help with identifying whether

(1) What you're solving has already been solved

(2) You have a bug in your solution

(3) You can get feedback from the reviewers such that the system is ultimately improved (this happens more often than you think)

(4) You have actually shown that it works better or just deluded yourself into thinking it does (because you happen to have done a lot of work and are convinced that it was good work).

Submitting a paper for publication is essentially independent verification and validation from (hopefully, but not always) impartial people. If you can convince a committee of peers that what you do is the state of the art and you can show this on some public benchmark, then it's a very different proposition from beating some internal benchmark, which may or may not be well-constructed/biased/etc.

The downside is that you have to write a paper, go through the reviewing process etc (i.e. what a boss at most companies would consider a waste of time).