Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Freedom of access to academic research

Interesting article:-

https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/1...i-hub-open-access-science-papers-lawsuit

Cornell University Library's arXiv

Caveat: The Subject line of this post, "Freedom of access to academic research" does not appear to utilize the correct word, conflating freedom and free. The OP's article is about "free access" (without cost at point of service). By contrast, "freedom of access" would tend to indicate a right to access. (For example: Most citizens do not have freedom of access to classified government documents.) As pertains to this article, Sci-Hub and LibGen allegedly perpetuated mass violation of copyright laws, in order to make materials available for free.

This situation is a predictable response to avarice. Academic publishing has profit margins higher than Apple's.




Elsevier and the other big publishers package journals the way that cable companies package channels. You want highly respected journal x? Great! It's part of a package of 78 other journals, including the Journal of Pointless Chemistry Experiments and the Journal of Wishful Thinking. You get all these journals for a $600,000 annual subscription fee (last 12 months of papers in the highly respected journal are embargoed unless you pay for the premium package).

No, I am not making this up.

They routinely charge $40 to $50 for pdf copies of 50-year-old papers.

Open source publishing is putting a big dent in this problem, though as an author, you may have to pay $3,000 to $4,000 to publish your paper. The US government has a policy requiring open-source copies of federally funded research. All this means that about a third of papers are now freely available. But what to do if you work at a place that can't afford $600,000 a year for a single set of journals and you need a bunch of papers behind a paywall? Or a curious gifted kid who might be able to pay $40 each for a few papers, but not $200? Until Sci-Hub came along, it was too bad.

This is the problem with greed in business: they want it all, they want it forever, and too bad for everyone else. Sci-hub is merely a response saying that third thing back to them. And it's not just Sci-Hub: there's an active boycott against one major publisher.

And don't even get me started on the bias toward sensational results, which itself has created an enormous crisis of irreproducibility.

You get no argument from me, Val.

Maybe scientists can wise up to this and self-publish in their own open-source journals in the interests of actually promoting scientific discovery, not just following protocols for resume padding and career ladder climbing.

Assortative matching would predict that like-quality researchers would cluster, reproducing a comparable ranking of open source publications to existing peer-reviewed ones behind paywall.

Heck, if these professors were really interested in the spirit of scientific discovery, they would uniformly require that all universities' tenure assessments give equal weighting in performance reviews to quality-matched open-source and existing traditional journals. The money saved from university subscriptions to useless journal servers would offset at least a good portion of the cost.

Heck, if government recognized this properly as being market failure, it could provide open-source self-publishing software free to academics as a subsidized public good. How much would that cost to develop, relative to the potential benefit associated with increased knowledge dissemination? I'd hazard a guess the cost would be quickly dwarfed.

Scientists? Academics? Are you going to rattle any cages?

The only problem is that this creates an opportunity to politicize science even further than it already is, because a vital part of that process is peer review and editing for content/readability, and some body of neutral experts would need to carry that out. Given our current anti-science regime, I suggest Washington kindly butt out.

Scientific community uprising it is, then.

Financing need not entail any vetting of candidates, merely the funding to develop a cheap self-publishing platform that academics and scientists could then leverage. The journals are already effectively self policing within the academic community. There’s no reason that couldn’t be carried out with free-ish publishing.

The problem with self-publishing is that it would be too easy to get around peer review.

Peer review as practiced now is admittedly a least-worst option in publishing, but self-publishing would let charlatans post their quackery (which they do anyway on their websites) alongside real studies, and it would hard to tell them apart. Peer review at least creates a line that says, "Stuff on this side of the line has been vetted by at least 3 people who state that they have no vested interest in its publication." It does keep the worst of the fake science out of the journals.

Maybe we have different notions of what self-publishing could involve. In my mind, groups of individuals could still peer review in the way that standard journals do now, providing a much needed filter, only the platform on which the article is ultimately viewed wouldn’t be a for-fee journal.

Honestly, it sounds like a good idea but would be unlikely to work. Hiring and tenure decisions are mostly based on publications and grant funding (for tenure). There's too much of a vested interest in getting as many papers published as possible, and even with the current respected journals, there have been terrible problems with fake peer review.

Bottom line: when you submit a paper for consideration, they ask you to give them the names of a few potential reviewers. People have given fake names as a way of cheating. The problem would likely get worse with self-publishing as a volunteer operation.

For example, see this editorial in Nature.

Research, like education, has become a field driven by industrial metrics that create incentives to do the wrong thing. Education has an obsession with test scores. Research has an obsession with "journal impact factors," number of citations per paper, and "altmetric" scores.

On the one hand, it's nice to know how many citations my papers have. On the other hand, there is way, way too much focus on numbers over content. As an example is people who cite their friends' work and vice versa. Like education, which it's a part of, it's a mess.

Yes, granted, there is a ton of inertia within academic circles on HR, and the system is rife with incentive problems. You get no argument from me there.

It takes an institutional push to overturn poor hiring and tenure review incentive systems, but it can be done. The dean of one of my alma maters successfully lobbied with the president of the university for an exception to the publishing/teaching/service splits of assessment. He wanted autonomy over hiring and promotion within his faculty as independent from the university's senior brass because--experience was showing--the formula was causing retention and promotion of people who looked good on paper, but were functionally only incremental innovators, and who developed a weak alumni network. This wasn't a podunk university, it was prominent.

The journals are much the same. I see them as operating somewhere between the roles of an esteemed university and a professional governing body, like a college of physicians, in terms of verifying quality. The question then becomes one of supply management, to ensure that the pool of quality research isn't unduly diluted by unscrupulous academics and researchers trying to pad their performance reviews. Fair point. Again, like the tenure re-negotiations, I see it as a hairy--but still achievable--goal.

Then the challenge becomes a solvable constrained optimization auction problem, where you're effectively auctioning off the right to publish in a "good" journal. Instead of auctioning out journal space on the basis of dollars, it's faculty time used for review/editing. You could constrain the supply of journals by matching them on labour intensity to peer review in reputable journals. Reviewers could be chosen based on prior publication rates, weighted by journal quality. (You could even adjust for crappy journal publications by discounting their conversion factor.) Because each reviewer has a finite 24 hours a day, and you can enforce leisure time and a fixed review rate on a given reviewer in your supply management algorithm, you can cap each reviewer's effective quality-adjusted supply of journal access.

The enforcement mechanism behind all this would require some contract by signatory participating universities that would include withdrawal of review and publishing privileges in the event of *ahem* impropriety. You could extend the memberships on a university-department affiliation basis, so that universities are then competing across two dimensions--ethics AND quality--with the best candidates presumably preferring some combination where the two qualities are strongly represented. (Maybe I'm Polyanna-ish there?)

No, I see this as being far more influential than just simply making access to research cost-free. It's about removing the capitalist incentives behind publishing garbage research and nullifying some of the perverse incentive systems that have crept into *what should be* a system built on the pursuit of truth and knowledge.

You get nothing but agreement from me that the existing system is rife with challenges, so it's refreshing to have a discussion about how to fix it!