While you're at it, make textbooks free. And movies. And games. Who is going to pay for standards development? How will it maintain a stable funding mechanism? I refer you to recent developments with the US government.
I agree; but then we need to come up with a different funding model.
Standards aren't free to publish and update, and currently the only revenue source is Pay-To-Access which most agree is problematic. The problem with government funded (e.g. funding the ones with legal enforcement), is that then we're picking winners and losers, and it may cause stagnation (or monopolies).
> The problem with government funded (e.g. funding the ones with legal enforcement), is that then we're picking winners and losers, and it may cause stagnation (or monopolies).
The government funds libraries and the grants for NIH research. It's already in the business of funding both sorts of institutions. Why, then, shouldn't it also simply self-publish results for the research it paid for?
The winners would be basically everyone, the losers' publishers. Publishing is already just a parasitic artifact of over-privatization of what should be government ran systems.
It isn't as if publishing has a large cost in general. In fact, the government already runs a huge publishing operation in the form of PACER. Further, anyone taking grant money is already heavily working with the government to convince it to fund them.
That's not the only funding model. Many industry standards are free to access, for example HL7 FHIR. Their funding model is largely organizational membership fees, plus some additional charges for meeting attendance and training courses. This works fine. Several federal regulations mandate the use of HL7 standards for healthcare interoperability.
I've been doing some work with colleagues at Cambridge and Imperial over the last year on using LLMs to improve evidence synthesis, primarily trying to find papers on the effectiveness of certain Conservation interventions. It's becoming clear that you really need to move beyond screening papers only by title and abstract - there's often information buried deep within papers that can only be found with access to full text. My colleague Anil Madhavapeddy has written a bit about our adventures in trying to ingest full-text academic papers: https://anil.recoil.org/notes/uk-national-data-lib
Yes, it depends on what you're doing; for general paper discovery / search tasks, title abstract can be enough (which is also why Springer and Elsevier have been pulling even their abstracts from sources like OpenAlex).
But for something like that you need full texts to look into results sections. I'm very curious how you're dealing with information contained in tables, or if you're dealing with snippets of text from the full-text alone. Have you poked around Elicit yet?
I've recently had this problem where the important information (number of study participants, and how many were filtered out during which step) were only encoded in figures, not in the text. Maddening.
My reading of this press release is that they are just removing the 12 month embargo period before the already mandated free-access (untypeset) versions of grant-supported manuscripts can go on pubmed central. The prior policy of a 12 month embargo period allowed publishers to have a small value add over the free version. This value add justifies subscription fees which support, among other things, infrastructure necessary to support peer review and possibly some in-house staff scientific editing and review. I do wonder whether it is worth it to make all papers available immediately if indirectly may make peer review even less supported than it is now.
We had some papers published under NIH grants at my last job. Our papers went public right away. Although the publishers charged the lab an extra fee because of free requirement.
As others pointed out reviewers often aren't compensated.
The annotate a lot of the papers with this “Mesh” terms, which is a controlled vocabulary used to help index all those papers. They update with new annotations daily.
I specifically said journals subscription fees support peer review infrastructure. Yes peer reviewers are unpaid but peer review also would not exist in anything resembling its current form in the absence of journal staff moving papers through the peer review system. Associate/deputy editors are unpaid but the main editor of the journal is often paid and does provide scientific oversight and review, particularly at the margin of acceptance/rejection. The main editor of course is also responsible for recruiting associate editors who in turn are responsible for finding appropriate peer reviewers, so having a good editor who can recruit and maintain quality deputy/associate editors is key. Some journals even have staff scientific reviewers which act as a check on the occasional oversights of unpaid peer review.
your reading is incorrect. they're not announcing the removal of the 12 month embargo, they're moving it forward to the 1st of July
the subscription fees are a parasitic joke in the first place. science should be free, now and forever, and peer review is generally done on a voluntary basis anyway
Moving forward the removal of the embargo. But my point is that access to federally funded science was free prior to anyone coming up with a plan to remove the embargo. You just needed to wait up to a year before a paper was put on pubmed central. This removal of the embargo is hardly a meaningful change in terms of access but one that erodes the institutions that ensure peer review happens. It is easy to say peer review is largely based on volunteers, but if journals ceased to exist tomorrow I doubt anyone here would volunteer to do the task of what the journals do now. At least you can put peer reviewer on your academic CV. The paid journal staff do much less glamorous work but still serve a role in keeping peer review running.
As someone that went through university solely thanks to Sci-Hub I value any effort that can be put into making scientific papers more available. I would have never been able to pay for all the papers I had to access and, in my case, I only got a smoother experience using uni available content in my last semester, so...
Sci-Hub was an incredible achievement. It was the closest humanity came to the interconnected sharing of knowledge we dreamed the Internet would be in the 20th century.
And they tried their hardest to kill it because journals believe they're entitled to extract a century of rent from work they did not perform.
Something I wrote related to this in 2001: "An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society"
https://pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors...
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."
Glad to see better policy happening -- even if all too slowly and only in some areas.
Just saying, sci-hub (and libgen) has turned off in my country (Netherlands). Like, they block access at an ISP level — and all ISPs and phone companies are blocking it. I imagine there might be a measurable decline in academic productivity, at that point.
Anyway, the warning is: liberal free countries can stop these things if they want to.
So… it’s up to us the public. Why can’t university libraries make their books and journals properly accessible in a digital format, like libgen and sci-hub? Why can’t they make their whole collection RAG retrivable, for that matter?
If your tax dollars are funding research, you should be entitled to reading the results.
I don't think I've met any other researchers who prefer paywalls. The problem is the most prestigious journals (Cell, Nature, Science, etc) have extremely parasitic business models - you pay a bunch of money to publish in them, and then other people pay them to read. But in return you get a CV boost.
They charge out the nose for open access (the researcher pays). With funding as tight as it is these days, maybe we'll see a shift to more a ethical publishing model as researchers start questioning whether it's worth it.
>"If your tax dollars are funding research, you should be entitled to reading the results."
This statement begs the question, though I understand why it seemingly 'makes sense'. Your tax money also funds lots of things you don't have access to or visibility of, and it's not clear how far your logic should extend. Should you have access to intelligence assessments, or the ability to purchase any technology developed with government funding? What about licenses to patents developed with the aid of government funding? How about access to government or external labs, or the use of their equipment?
>Effective with the date of this notice and until the details of the new foreign collaboration award structure are released, NIH will not issue awards to domestic or foreign entities (new, renewal or non-competing continuation), that include a subaward to a foreign entity.
Have the new generations forgotten how to praise an accomplishment even when it was realized by their enemy. “Give the devil his due”. Partisan myopia has reached an intellectually crippling height in the US. As a scientist who has worked in academia for decades, there is no equivocation in me about praising this move. So many times has my progress in research be speed-bumped by a paywall. Rejoice in the purple between red and blue.
Readit News
Next, it would be great if published standards were freely available. It is astonishing to me that they are not.
THIS. Especially for things like the NEC and other building safety regulations. Then move on to ISO/ANSI/IEC/etc standards.
Standards aren't free to publish and update, and currently the only revenue source is Pay-To-Access which most agree is problematic. The problem with government funded (e.g. funding the ones with legal enforcement), is that then we're picking winners and losers, and it may cause stagnation (or monopolies).
I don't like it. I also don't have a better idea.
The government funds libraries and the grants for NIH research. It's already in the business of funding both sorts of institutions. Why, then, shouldn't it also simply self-publish results for the research it paid for?
The winners would be basically everyone, the losers' publishers. Publishing is already just a parasitic artifact of over-privatization of what should be government ran systems.
It isn't as if publishing has a large cost in general. In fact, the government already runs a huge publishing operation in the form of PACER. Further, anyone taking grant money is already heavily working with the government to convince it to fund them.
If you'd like the public to somehow pick up the tab for drafting them, sure.
I've been doing some work with colleagues at Cambridge and Imperial over the last year on using LLMs to improve evidence synthesis, primarily trying to find papers on the effectiveness of certain Conservation interventions. It's becoming clear that you really need to move beyond screening papers only by title and abstract - there's often information buried deep within papers that can only be found with access to full text. My colleague Anil Madhavapeddy has written a bit about our adventures in trying to ingest full-text academic papers: https://anil.recoil.org/notes/uk-national-data-lib
But for something like that you need full texts to look into results sections. I'm very curious how you're dealing with information contained in tables, or if you're dealing with snippets of text from the full-text alone. Have you poked around Elicit yet?
Most of the papers are constructed from their latex sources so there's an easy way to undo it i guess.
https://github.com/kermitt2/grobid
As others pointed out reviewers often aren't compensated.
Pubmed is an amazing resource.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
The annotate a lot of the papers with this “Mesh” terms, which is a controlled vocabulary used to help index all those papers. They update with new annotations daily.
https://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/meshhome.html
the subscription fees are a parasitic joke in the first place. science should be free, now and forever, and peer review is generally done on a voluntary basis anyway
And they tried their hardest to kill it because journals believe they're entitled to extract a century of rent from work they did not perform.
Glad to see better policy happening -- even if all too slowly and only in some areas.
Anyway, the warning is: liberal free countries can stop these things if they want to.
So… it’s up to us the public. Why can’t university libraries make their books and journals properly accessible in a digital format, like libgen and sci-hub? Why can’t they make their whole collection RAG retrivable, for that matter?
I don't think I've met any other researchers who prefer paywalls. The problem is the most prestigious journals (Cell, Nature, Science, etc) have extremely parasitic business models - you pay a bunch of money to publish in them, and then other people pay them to read. But in return you get a CV boost.
They charge out the nose for open access (the researcher pays). With funding as tight as it is these days, maybe we'll see a shift to more a ethical publishing model as researchers start questioning whether it's worth it.
This statement begs the question, though I understand why it seemingly 'makes sense'. Your tax money also funds lots of things you don't have access to or visibility of, and it's not clear how far your logic should extend. Should you have access to intelligence assessments, or the ability to purchase any technology developed with government funding? What about licenses to patents developed with the aid of government funding? How about access to government or external labs, or the use of their equipment?
https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-1...
>Effective with the date of this notice and until the details of the new foreign collaboration award structure are released, NIH will not issue awards to domestic or foreign entities (new, renewal or non-competing continuation), that include a subaward to a foreign entity.
No more collaborations for US researchers.
Dead Comment