Thanks for posting this, Jorge. If anybody doubts the problems people face in access to research, hear this: my labmate said that when he was in India, he had to take a 1.5day train ride to Bangalore and stay overnight in a hotel just to use the library at the Indian Institute of Science. Open Access is pretty important to him.

I despise that we the people don't have access to these documents. RIP Aaron Swartz.

I recently realized how much information there is when I was shown how too access my university librarys database subscriptions. There are so much that noone outside of the academic world will ever see. Or even CAN see without paying alot of money

I recall being an undergraduate student and later a resident and unable to access research articles that I wanted to read. I just accepted the status quo. I am thankful for the open access movement for changing that!

Unbelievable. The costs of education and the self-perpetuating system inherent is ridiculous. Tools such as blogs, Wikipedia and most impressively Khan Academy should be utilised properly and widespread ... it's just a start but when people begin to realise to power of free access to knowledge and open source economics we can build a better future for sure !!

Thank you for creating this video! It addresses the problems head on for people who aren't aware of the problems in research publishing today. Like a PSA for the good of science!!

I loved this video!!! I get so frustrated being a university student paying for school and for my books etc... and even online textbooks are over 500+$ for something that isn't even printed on PAPER.... Information should be free to access

I couldn't agree more, accessible research and education is absolutely vital to moving societies around the globe to a better future. Thank you for publishing a video that makes it easier to understand

An excellent film that makes a lot of sense. I fully agree. I appreciate the referral to this video by Coursera and the University of Leiden.

Ciencia libre para una sociedad libre al alcance de tod@s. Free Science for a free society.

Absolutely incredible graphics and explenation, thank you so much!

Loving the SMMA videos, just started sharing our journey as well, keep it up! 🚀

Fair point. I typically do not report my impact factors on my annual evaluations but I do report my citations. Having said that, I have been told quite candidly by admins in the past that there was a hard line base impact factor that I had to meet for purposes of P&T. So, while I agree the citations are more relevant, those making the decisions don't necessarily see it that way.

Totally agree. About time too that someone said these things aloud

This already exists for physics: arxiv.org People in the fields represented there still submit to journals (most of the time) but the arxiv version is often more up-to-date than the published version (that most people don't read anyway).

This is a really good overview of Open Access. One issue that isn't raised is that in many cases Open Access puts the cost of publishing on the scientists producing the work. While in some cases grants or universities can cover this, at universities with less resources they may be restricted by budget to publishing in a traditional journal. The knock on effect is that richer universities could make their content more available and read than others; a problem for low/middle income countries.

Really well done! There's a newer video from Wiley (search "RCUK Open Access") that explains the RCUK Open Acess mandates. Especially good for researchers.

It's a really sharp problem! But fortunatelly, a lot of journals also publish contacts of authors, and some scientists ready for a conversation. It very helped me, when I wrote my dissertation!

Amazing presentation! I forwarded it to all of my friends who are or want to become scientifics. Looking at the video a second time, I realize that having a wallpaper picture for each part of the pres would have been better than white screens... maybe a tip for the next one? Thanks so much for the briefing anyways!

As a Chemist, this video made me worried, specially because I never got to know the prices for the subscriptions (the University pays it), Where did you see that Tetrahedron subscription is $40k?

I think this is a fantastic video explaining why we need Open Access within the scientific community. What this doesn't tell me is how to publish in an open access journal, where I could publish, what I can publish, or if any of my past research published in non-open access journals could be published in an open access format. Does anyone know any resources that would be helpful for answering those questions?

Creative Common (CC) articles can be offered by Openaccess system being as an other alternative, which is vital to the world today as well.

My first journal article was just accepted for publication. Open Access caught me off guard, because the publisher is asking me to pay $3000 for it!

@caseykoons6956

6 жыл бұрын

Talk to your institution. It's likely they have an institutional repository that can publish the article at no cost to you.

Great work!

hey, i wanted to add german subtitles and create a video remix, but unfortunately there is a copyright claim unsolved? (if you click on "create a remix for this video") Would be great if you can solve this, than I can create a remix which references this original video. :) Best regards, Matthias

I fully agree! Even as a layman scientist myself, I'm constantly digging and purging through articles & abstracts - that I can find easily enough and that tend to lead to other open-source data. I don't bother buying, but it echoes your point on what's really available to the masses on the whole. It's scary to know that learning sacred geometry & its applications in science today costs $40K/year. It screams Secret Society, but I guess we can't have all the 'grubs' wake up at the same time.

You'll want to look at PLoS for starters. But typically closed publications like Nature and Science are providing open access to some articles, so keep your eyes open for those as well.

Great explanation

Well Explained.! Good Work.

Open Access (OA) movement/OA is a movement that makes online publications immediately available free of charge and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.

This is really well done. What programs were used to create this piece, I am curious? Thanks.

hey i am writing an article about open source and peer review, and i was wondering if you could cite the statement that journal prices have outpaced inflation? i agree they have become more expensive, but i'm wondering where this figure comes from. thanks!

i would like to hear the money part also because who pays and who receives for wat is important ..

RIP Aaron Swartz. Even though he is no longer with us, other people and organizations have taken up the open access mantle. No to learned helplessness.

Will you have CC for this? Or perhaps a transcript somewhere? I would like to use it in my class but we require CC or transcripts for accessibility purposes. Thanks!

Oh damn. I just saw a Journal that costs like 145 dollars. I feel like crying.

@sb.sb.sb.

3 жыл бұрын

libgen

Thank you very much. :)

Impressive!

the distinction between OA and non-OA journals seems somewhat outdated. at least for my field (neuroscience). i'm not aware of any journal that wouldn't offer at least optional open access (including Nature - which was mentioned in the video).

You are absolutely right. Such a story was in Nature (I think) just weeks ago. In Scientists want to publish. In OA, the scientist pays to get his research published. The journal wants money, the scientist wants to publish. It's only natural that there appear journals that accept anything, as long as the scientist pays. That's quite different from the traditional system, where journals usually have to provide quality in order to convince researchers or institutes to get their licence...

I blogged about this a while back, biggest problem in science right now

@chimammyprincess1038

3 жыл бұрын

😊🙃😊

Here's the thing, I'm writing a research paper on open access and publishing and scholarly communication dissemination, and some big journals (*cough* Elsevier *cough*) have a profit margin of 35 - 40%. That's why they don't want to change, because they have a profit margin that's just staggeringly high.

As far as I know, PLoS waives the publishing fee if the author cannot afford it. And Pubmed is an Open Access repository with no publication fee. Also, many paid journals also charge the author a fee. Even if such safeguards weren't in place, the all-in cost of being able to contribute to and read such journals will be much lower in an Open Access world.

Heather, what the peer-review has to do with Open Access? OA journals get papers peer-reviewed in the same way as subscription ones

Added

I think, that perspective is drastically dependant on discipline. In my discipline (Control Engineering) impact factor above 0.5 is a great feat. I'm not against OA, and I'm aware that some of them have IF. But unfortunately for those with IF only those with money can publish:(

(continued) The technology and time required to do this (actually distribution) is virtually nil. A number of us in my sub-specialty are considering starting our own journal. We've already roughed it out, and it would be trivial to do, if we made it fully electronic. If you did a breakdown of 'real costs', you'd find that even holier-than-thou 'open access' journals are a real gouge.

This is a BIG problem. But I watched up to 7:08 and didn't here a word said about the issue of needing to peer review scholarly articles, especially if those articles are going to form the basis for life or death family medical decisions. Scholars are always wrong about things, and peer review is critical to establishing legitimacy. Someone's got to choose and pay anonymous reviewers. How to deal with this problem through open access?

The video briefly mentions the situation in resource-limited countries. Access to the health literature is limited by the expense. Researchers and practitioners in resource-limited settings work at a significant disadvantage. Programs like the UN's HINARI help, but are really targeted toward governments. Smaller NGO's who often run the most effective and innovative programs are unable to access most of the literature or may have troubles composing a well-referenced manuscript to publish.

"Good stuff!"

1. You're right, moreover it is easier for OAJ papers to get cited, and in consequence OAJ can get a decent IF 2. I think that some OAJ pay their reviewers, but I can be wrong (Springer and BMC) 3. It is hugely dependant on discipline - BMC takes around 1500$ for a paper, subscription based journals can be free (but take long to publish - journals from IEEE, Elsevier, Sage) or relatively cheap - like 50-100$ per page, or for color pages or pages over 6th. In most OAJ - no money - no paper

I think ppl overestimate the value of Impact Factors to get academic positions. While a paper in Nature or PNAS looks very nice in the CV and they are really good achievements, the good comitees look at your citations. It is much better a paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society (IF 5,4) with 15 citations/year than a PNAS (IF 9,5) with 3 citations/year

Nice

This is why peer-reviewed blogs are going to become popular.

Agreed.

Open access is definitely going to be the future. Once some of these open access journals start generating a decent impact factor there will be little incentive to go with these prehistoric closed access publishers.

Great vid..The same problem exist with cyber security..malware analysis is stifled because the research from malware is not made accessible to the public.

That's the whole point, electronic publishing costs nothing more than simply setting up a file server. There allready exist public ones like arXiv, but also every university has -or can afford to have- one. The research is already paid for by the university as do the researchers and the reviewers. Electronic publishing costs basically nothing. It still requires some organization though (to handle the peer review process), but these are imho minor technicalities.

I don't really understand how this system works / doesn't work. What do you mean by journals? Is JSTOR an example? are there any others? Also do universities subscribe to these journals, so that students can get access to the papers?

Oh, and who is going to convince university tenure and promotion committees, deans, provosts, etc. to not look for impact factor? In talk around campus with colleagues, I am under the impression that many of us would have no problem with open access in theory. However, making that work is a different matter entirely. When scholars don't have their chances for promotion, merit pay, tenure, etc, tied to the quality of the journal they publish in, they will be much more likely to get on board.

Try going to keepsubs.com and putting the link for this video. It downloads a document but you'll need to label it as an .srt document and then open it in Wordpad or something like that. It's in a subtitles format (you'll see what I mean) but it still probably works out faster than you transcribing the whole video.

Sorry, what I mean is that the system does not work as suggested. I meant that while papers in journals with high IFs are nice, the citations of your papers count more. If more ppl read your papers because they are OA -> you get more citations Moreover, OA journals have IF also, in Biology their IF is often above the average subscription ones (PLoS Genetics has same IF as PNAS)

Shifting costs to those who wish to publish would probably not have a very big impact. Partly because the costs would be something in the range like 5 to 10 bucks (what you're really paying for is to even the costs of hosting your paper online, so a few dollars isn't strange) and partly because it is the only logical option if you want to make it as independent as possible while keeping it free and open and without going bankrupt. The idea is to make everything accessible to everyone for free.

Gargouri, Yassine, Lariviere, Vincent, Gingras, Yves, Brody, Tim, Carr, Les and Harnad, Stevan (2012) Testing the Finch Hypothesis on Green OA Mandate Effectiveness Open Access Week 2012

Internet gonna blow this fuckin' walls. This is inevitable. The question is: we will cry about that? Or we will build a new model?

That is what I've experienced, too. IF is flawed, but it remains important to those who do not understand it.

Short personal experience: I am interested in many fields and occasionally stumble upon some popular scientific article in a newspaper and want to find out more. Like two weeks ago. The article linked the original paper, but I found out that I had to pay 20 USD for it. Lucky for me a friend of mine is working in a lab and they have prepaid access to such sites, so she downloaded the paper and sent it to me. It was just three pages short, two pages text, one page a graph. Absolutely not worth 20 USD by any standards. Reading it was OK, it clarified a tiny misunderstanding that I saw in the popular article, maybe the author misinterpreted something in the translation or I did not understand it correctly. The funny thing is that the appendixes were free for download and had way more pages and information than the paper itself. So, ironically, the free to download content was more valuable, yet without context, but I got that from the popular science article in the newspapers, even though it was a bit imprecise. I wrote a short comment to the popular science article asking where we as a society make a mistake, if I have to pay for an interesting paper I want to read, but I get offered the Bible or the Koran for free on the streets (this actually happened to me). Knowledge is being locked away, while theological BS (sorry if you are a religious believer) is distributing for free. Btw. I do not work in any field of science, I just support it, the scientific way, reasonable thinking. I regularly check PLOS, nature, etc. sites for interesting papers to read them without any actual use for them, just out of pure curiosity. Also, there seems to be a huge pressure on publishing, when quantity is more important than quality, several people from academia criticized this in an article (publish or perish), at least according to a popular science article I read in some newspaper. Even the friend who downloaded the paper mentioned before told me that she was at a symposium and that she attended one presentation which lacked the basic scientific approach and just found some correlation between toxoplasmosis and something else without any reasonable context and that she felt that somebody simply HAD to publish SOMETHING, regardless of the quality. The academia is a world of its own, mysterious and hidden from us "ordinary people". But even scientists are just people, "hidden" behind letters in their titles and lab coats and scrubs they wear... I am just an outside observer, but I feel the way it works is not the best for our culture.

@erigor11

6 жыл бұрын

You got it. Completely on point. I am part of the scientific community and these problems sure get me anxious. Consumism and capitalist thought is slowly destroying everything I love and that sure includes science. Many succesful scientists make a good study; then they break it into pieces just to get a higher number of publications. That tears up the point of the study and so, makes it much more difficult to understand what's the importance of what has been done there. That's just one example of many terrible issues that come along with such a stupidity like the need of continously publish or the implications of an atrocious paywall in order to access knowledge. This has to stop, there's no way science is made correctly with such awful politics and behaviours.

@leptium

6 жыл бұрын

Great analysis. The real problem it's the university origin, in many cases It was a creation of the kings, or by states, there's a great talk about it: Bastos & Villanueva: "La universidad que no queremos" / "The university that we do not want" It's in KZread, when we understand it, we can change the perspectives. Thanks for the video. Greetings from Galapagos Island's country: Ecuador, South America.

With full reuse rights third party repositories would be legal (and possibly likely). Such mirrors should be an integral part of a OA business model.

For those who don't get the point of the video, one could use domain names as an analogy. In the 80s and 90s, Network Solutions was the only company selling domain names. The US govt. gave away the rights to sell names and NS pocketed the revenues. And like any monopoly, they ripped off the public charging $50-100 for a single year, PLUS "fees". Few people or companies could afford websites. Now that selling domain names is more open, prices are low and web sites are easy to start.

I wonder how or where the copyediting and translation of those studies that are not in English or are written by non-native English speakers will come into play in the Open Access model. Also, how would third-party or blind reviews will be addressed. These concerns coming from a grad student who also happens to be a copy editor by profession.

Interesante!

I'm confused, it states this as a website or at least online. Where can we find one of these journals or single journal if a singular object. I'd like to have access to a free journal.

woah.. dude as far i understood, this service is like a WebProxy with journals subscriptions, more or less the way universities do in their intranets?

word up

Why not post a pre-print of your papers open access? You can use an blogging platform for this, or maybe even just use something like Google Docs. Or provide OA to your methods and data via open notebook science!

Not really an option. Unless you publish with a copyright agreement rider of some sort, once your data and manuscript are published, it is no longer yours to distribute. Even the data can't be used or distributed unless otherwise specified. That being said, a lot of high dimensional data sets such as genomics or proteomics get deposited in public repositories, but the compiled data and figures technically can't be used again without copyright violation.

The stopgap for this is university administrators, the people that hand out tenure. They have to start respecting open journals, then the paper will follow.

A great deal of research is not done with money from the government. Faculty are often paying their own salaries on soft money from grants from private entities which also fund the research itself. You are of course correct that some of the research is also being payed for by government grants and being run by faculty being payed through the state in the case of public institutions, but it is obviously not always that way.

gostei do canal beijos

See also the "scientific oeuvre" concept. To find it do a search "Tiberius Brastaviceanu The Scientific Oeuvre"

(cont) anyway this totally makes sense of course, but the article publishers are public institutions? I thought they were private ones. Is the video advocating for a public institution to publish the freely accessible articles? Or is it just hoping some private company will be convinced to change their business model in a way that articles are freely accessible? (like getting income from the writers of the articles?) I think another video could be made that is clearer on these topics.

Question: What do you think of the sci-hub site (the one with the hyphen, just search for it)? Are there any members of Academia willing to share their view?

@Fabito853

8 жыл бұрын

+Erik Žiak (tramstefanikova) it is just democratizing access. For many of us in the third world it is just not affordable, it is impossible. Additionally, it is not attacking us, the creators, just the publishers who are making too much profit out of the transaction costs.

Unfortunately the cost of publishing in an OA journal has certainly preventing me from using this media! (Even though I do act as a referee for a number of OA journals...)

@Jerzy, I guess you don't have to pay publication costs in Nature, Science or PNAS?

Myth 1: The IF. Being OA has nothing to do with having IF or not. This is up to Thompson-Reuters and getting enough citations. ISI does not exclude journals based on being subscription or OA Myth 2: peer-review. Articles in OA get peer-reviewed the same way as subscrition ones. All referees do the work for free, why they should do worse for OA? Myth 3: costs. A paper in an OA costs slightly more than a subscription one. We can destine library susbcription money to pay those costs

The only complaint I've heard about electronic open access journals is the possibility of the journal going under and the paper being lost forever. Anyone care to comment? Although, archiving electronic media of any format is not a resolved issue in library science, from what I hear.

That is nice for you, but the inmense majority of subscription journals ask for publication costs just slightly below the costs of OA, even if they have an IF of 2

@ChadDidNothingWrong

3 жыл бұрын

What about after you add in the revenue they get from selling the papers for $30+ each for 75 or 100 years afterwards (or however long copyright is these days)? Oh wait sorry I see the point you were making now....that there is little incentive to publish Open Access if the big journals can offer you a lower publication cost. ....the journals ought to just charge you for citing the papers instead of simply viewing them. ....the other thing is, why does peer review even need to cost so much? Is there so little incentive for people to review papers? So here's my imagining of my ideal system: An online journal where you can publish straight away, but with an asterisk as 'peer review requested'. (A big asterisk-I know..) ....Because If someone comes along who really wants to use your paper to build on their own work, then they would obviously have an incentive to verify it first...which could constitute at least a SORT of peer review. So imagine he does that (uses and cites your paper), then his would get YOUR paper's asterisk sort of "half-removed" (since there is still no proper peer review of maximum potential objectivity yet). Meanwhile his paper would get a similar "half-asterisk" for citing a paper that ONLY HE has peer-reviewed-and potentially without maximum neutrality. So, as time goes on, if a third and maybe fourth group want to cite your paper, and both had also been required to peer review it first (and done so), it could then either 1.) be argued that your paper has enough confirmation to finally remove its "half-asterisk", or 2.) otherwise the fact that your still-un-properly-reviewed paper is so in demand by others could lead it to be placed toward the top of a list of "greatest in need of peer review" by a system algorithm. ...then as soon as proper peer review has finally been contributed, any asterisks on your paper (as well as on the papers citing it) can be removed. ...and on the other hand, if that proper peer review process finds issues in your work, then all those asterisks are replaced with something else (probably a big X lol) and the papers all moved to a separate archive in the system, where they could be either re-done or just left.

I'm not angry, I was speaking somewhat out of the context, making abstraction of Open Access. So it was Eisen's comment after all? Thanks for pointing that out. And thanks for the support as well, it's a relief after the previous comments.

I totally feel your pain and frustration. Federal agencies pay millions for research essentially owned by taxpayers. Sometimes I know not all research is credible and valuable. Paid journals may be the way to hide their shitty work and also from open criticism. The complaint list can go on.

That's interesting. So how did it get to this point where the people doing the less costly and difficult work make so much profit? Is it merely just habits, prestige and the culture of the scientific community that creates this? Perhaps scientists could learn a lot from the art world. I'm finding a lot of musicians for example are very open to adopting publishing alternatives to major records.

I just cant believe I didn´t knew about this video before...

Indeed it is another discussion what a fair price is. But opposite to real Gold OA (like PLoS) Hybrid Open Access (like Springer Open Choice) is much worse in terms of transparency.

What is not said in this video, is that open access journals, especially those with impact factor demand really huge amounts of money for publishing. You say that journals require 1500$ for subscription, BMC journals want 1500$ for publication of a single paper! In my country, if I publish in a journal without IF, I might as well throw it into trash - it does not count to anything towards promotion or financing or even recognition.

I agree. Authors fees are a way for publishers to make money when they can't sell subscriptions. They will not settle for lesser income from a journal just to advance science. Publishers are businesses, not scientific advocacy organizations.

Also, is a journal a collection of papers? so at 2:06 when you say a journal costs $40,000, does that mean you get loads of papers, or is that just one academic paper? Sorry but i really don't understand this stuff.

5:03 There's the problem. This is a racket.

👍

OK, so how are they funded? writer pays? The film stated there was free immediate access - immediate after review? or immediate after submission? I have nothing against OA I just want quality maintained. I also dont want to have to wade through adverts to read the paper. My opinion, others may be happy to.

I would like to publishe my work in open access but all the journals ask around 3000 $ to the scientists to publish their work in open access !! this is impossible for me to pay 3000$ for each of my paper to a journal. so i cannot publish my work in open access

Many OA Journals openly advertise they publish based on scientific rigor rather than scientific merit or importance. A recent spoof paper written by an investigative reporter revealed that of the 304 OA journals he submitted to, over half accepted the paper, despite fatal flaws. I think we should be careful what we wish for.