Why Isn't Academic Research Free to Everyone?

[ksen]

http://www.theatlantic.com/educatio...nt-academic-research-free-to-everyone/382917/

A blurb below the search bar on Google scholar tells you to "stand on the shoulders of giants." The giants in question here are academic writers, and Google scholar does provide searchable access to essays on a dizzying array of topics, from governance in post-genocide Rwanda to the ethics of using polygraph tests on juveniles.

Except for one problem: All of these articles are paywalled.

Since this comes up a lot about scientific journals I am posting it in one of the science-y forums.

It really is too bad that so many articles are controlled by only a couple of companies looking to extract money from researchers in order to forge ahead in their particular field of research.

How much progress would have been lost if paywalls were in place since greek times?

Or do paywalls not really hinder research at all?

 

[Underseer]

Lots of people have been trying to change this for some time.

I'm not sure all research needs to be made free, but certainly any research that was even partially funded by tax dollars should be posted for free on the Internet. If the people paid for it, the people own it. Period.

The problem is that the Internet is a new thing. Prior to the Internet, publishing something was expensive, and publishing something for relatively few people even more expensive (since the costs are divided among fewer customers). Thus most research is "owned" by journals, who are in the business of charging for access.

One solution that has been tried is free internet journals. The idea is that scientists publish their works in the internet journals, their work still gets out there, and everyone can view the published papers for free. It's a great idea, but in the interest of getting more papers to publish, internet journals have developed extremely low standards such that they will pretty much publish anything that gets submitted. Consequently, no one takes them very seriously because they're full of pure nonsense written by kooks and incompetents. Someone purposefully wrote a fake paper that was obviously wrong and had no problem getting multiple internet journals to publish it, thus demonstrating just how inadequate the review process is for internet journals.

I still think Internet journals are the way to go, but someone is going to have to pick one and force them to develop better standards for accepting papers or else the concept will go nowhere.

 

[Bronzeage]

This is one of those "no such thing as a free lunch" situation. The server which stores the research is not free. The electricity which powers it, is not free. Someone formatted it to be compatible with a digital medium, which was not free. When all things are considered, it's probably a pretty good deal.

Actually, when the cost of rowing a Greek trireme across the Mediterranean Sea to the Library of Alexandria, just to look up a reference, makes paying a few drachma to sit in a comfortable chair and download a paper, seem quite reasonable.

If it takes money to make knowledge available, it's much better than having no access to knowledge at all.

 

[untermensche]

What is worse than a few people not having access to scientific data is nobody having it.

And that happens all the time in drug research. Studies that don't reach the right conclusions are buried and gone forever.

 

[Underseer]

This is one of those "no such thing as a free lunch" situation. The server which stores the research is not free. The electricity which powers it, is not free. Someone formatted it to be compatible with a digital medium, which was not free. When all things are considered, it's probably a pretty good deal.

Actually, when the cost of rowing a Greek trireme across the Mediterranean Sea to the Library of Alexandria, just to look up a reference, makes paying a few drachma to sit in a comfortable chair and download a paper, seem quite reasonable.

If it takes money to make knowledge available, it's much better than having no access to knowledge at all.

False dichotomy.

The publishing costs on the Internet are negligible compared to print. That's why Wikipedia and many other things on the Internet are free.

Even if the costs were as great as you say, then that still doesn't explain why the public can't have access to research the public paid to have done in the first place. If a government-run web site is the only way this could be affordable, then so be it, but that simply is not the case. Plenty of Internet journals get by without charging people to read their contents.

 

[Underseer]

What is worse than a few people not having access to scientific data is nobody having it.

And that happens all the time in drug research. Studies that don't reach the right conclusions are buried and gone forever.

They do that whenever they can, but any time they do, they eventually get caught.

 

[untermensche]

What is worse than a few people not having access to scientific data is nobody having it.

And that happens all the time in drug research. Studies that don't reach the right conclusions are buried and gone forever.

They do that whenever they can, but any time they do, they eventually get caught.

There is no requirement to publish failed studies.

So a drug like Prozac can achieve statistical significance in 2 out of 9 studies and the 2 studies are good enough to get the drug approved.

 

[Bronzeage]

What I find truly amazing is how much information is available online. A lot of money has been spent for the purpose of finding pre-digital texts and preserving them in for posterity.

Making of America Cornell

Making of America Michigan

The amount of information available on these two sites is staggering. If it was not available here, it would practically inaccessible, if for no other reason than no one would know it exists. The accumulated knowledge we have from previous generations is probably less than half of the total. When something falls out of use, the knowledge it fades, as well. The Romans build with concrete which still stands today, but for about 8 centuries, the formula and technique was lost. Concrete had to be reverse engineered, because all written information on the subject was lost when there was no more need for great structures like aqueducts and temples.

 

[ryan]

You are not looking in the right places. You can get almost any literature through library networks. I can get a book sent to me from Colorado for example, with a $5.00 per year membership.

MIT, Columbia University, Harvard, Oxford etc. all have free open courseware where you can actually watch lectures, do tests and homework, and even follow it all with ready-made notes.

And then there are other resources like Khan Academy who helps me with my university courses.

It's all out there; you just have to learn the system and find it!

Besides all of that, the most help that I receive is from forums like this that are directed at people helping others with homework, and it's all free!

 

[beero1000]

This is one of those "no such thing as a free lunch" situation. The server which stores the research is not free. The electricity which powers it, is not free. Someone formatted it to be compatible with a digital medium, which was not free. When all things are considered, it's probably a pretty good deal.

Actually, when the cost of rowing a Greek trireme across the Mediterranean Sea to the Library of Alexandria, just to look up a reference, makes paying a few drachma to sit in a comfortable chair and download a paper, seem quite reasonable.

If it takes money to make knowledge available, it's much better than having no access to knowledge at all.

Bullshit. Corporate publishers abusively take advantage of academics' research, writing, editing, and funding in order to make obscene profits by selling that work back to their universities. Read more here - http://gowers.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/elsevierstatementfinal.pdf.

Academics have started fighting back, resigning from journal boards, using open journals and archives (like arXiv), boycotting companies like Elsevier, and many libraries have cancelled their subscriptions to overpriced bundles.

 

[beero1000]

What I find truly amazing is how much information is available online. A lot of money has been spent for the purpose of finding pre-digital texts and preserving them in for posterity.

Making of America Cornell

Making of America Michigan

The amount of information available on these two sites is staggering. If it was not available here, it would practically inaccessible, if for no other reason than no one would know it exists. The accumulated knowledge we have from previous generations is probably less than half of the total. When something falls out of use, the knowledge it fades, as well. The Romans build with concrete which still stands today, but for about 8 centuries, the formula and technique was lost. Concrete had to be reverse engineered, because all written information on the subject was lost when there was no more need for great structures like aqueducts and temples.

You are not looking in the right places. You can get almost any literature through library networks. I can get a book sent to me from Colorado, with a $5.00 per year membership.

MIT, Columbia University, Harvard, Oxford etc. all have free open courseware where you can actually watch lectures, do tests and homework, and even follow it all with ready-made notes.

And then there are other resources like Khan Academy who helps me with my university courses.
It's all out there; you just have to learn to system and find it!

Besides all of that, the most help that I receive is from forums like this that are directed at people helping others with homework, and it's all free!

These are not archives of current academic research.

That would be something like www.arXiv.org.

 

[ryan]

You are not looking in the right places. You can get almost any literature through library networks. I can get a book sent to me from Colorado, with a $5.00 per year membership.

MIT, Columbia University, Harvard, Oxford etc. all have free open courseware where you can actually watch lectures, do tests and homework, and even follow it all with ready-made notes.

And then there are other resources like Khan Academy who helps me with my university courses.
It's all out there; you just have to learn to system and find it!

Besides all of that, the most help that I receive is from forums like this that are directed at people helping others with homework, and it's all free!

These are not archives of current academic research.

That would be something like www.arXiv.org.

Apparently I am too riled up to read - too much coffee.

 

[ksen]

You are not looking in the right places. You can get almost any literature through library networks. I can get a book sent to me from Colorado for example, with a $5.00 per year membership.

MIT, Columbia University, Harvard, Oxford etc. all have free open courseware where you can actually watch lectures, do tests and homework, and even follow it all with ready-made notes.

And then there are other resources like Khan Academy who helps me with my university courses.

It's all out there; you just have to learn the system and find it!

Besides all of that, the most help that I receive is from forums like this that are directed at people helping others with homework, and it's all free!

Does Khan Academy offer courses on post formatting for readability?

because damn . . .

 

[Bronzeage]

You are not looking in the right places. You can get almost any literature through library networks. I can get a book sent to me from Colorado, with a $5.00 per year membership.

MIT, Columbia University, Harvard, Oxford etc. all have free open courseware where you can actually watch lectures, do tests and homework, and even follow it all with ready-made notes.

And then there are other resources like Khan Academy who helps me with my university courses.
It's all out there; you just have to learn to system and find it!

Besides all of that, the most help that I receive is from forums like this that are directed at people helping others with homework, and it's all free!

These are not archives of current academic research.

That would be something like www.arXiv.org.

I didn't claim it was.

I don't understand why you feel the results of other people's work should be available to you at no charge, with no regard to the effort required to make such work available. Am I missing something?

 

[ryan]

You are not looking in the right places. You can get almost any literature through library networks. I can get a book sent to me from Colorado for example, with a $5.00 per year membership.

MIT, Columbia University, Harvard, Oxford etc. all have free open courseware where you can actually watch lectures, do tests and homework, and even follow it all with ready-made notes.

And then there are other resources like Khan Academy who helps me with my university courses.

It's all out there; you just have to learn the system and find it!

Besides all of that, the most help that I receive is from forums like this that are directed at people helping others with homework, and it's all free!

Does Khan Academy offer courses on post formatting for readability?

because damn . . .

I have no idea what I was responding to.

 

[ksen]

lol :hug:

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I don't understand why you feel the results of other people's work should be available to you at no charge, with no regard to the effort required to make such work available. Am I missing something?

I think you're missing that in most cases the public is paying for that research so why shouldn't the results of the research they paid for be made available to them?

 

[beero1000]

These are not archives of current academic research.

That would be something like www.arXiv.org.

I didn't claim it was.

I don't understand why you feel the results of other people's work should be available to you at no charge, with no regard to the effort required to make such work available. Am I missing something?

If you had bothered to educate yourself on the topic you'd understand why that was so funny.

 

[Bronzeage]

lol :hug:

- - - Updated - - -

I don't understand why you feel the results of other people's work should be available to you at no charge, with no regard to the effort required to make such work available. Am I missing something?

I think you're missing that in most cases the public is paying for that research so why shouldn't the results of the research they paid for be made available to them?

I don't think anyone is being asked to shoulder the entire bill for the project, just for the privilege of reading the paper. As I said before, online storage is not free. Why is compensation for related costs to make the paper available a bad thing?

I didn't claim it was.

I don't understand why you feel the results of other people's work should be available to you at no charge, with no regard to the effort required to make such work available. Am I missing something?

If you had bothered to educate yourself on the topic you'd understand why that was so funny.

I am well known for my ignorance on these matters, which is why I asked the question. So, do you have an answer?

 

[ksen]

I think you're missing that in most cases the public is paying for that research so why shouldn't the results of the research they paid for be made available to them?

I don't think anyone is being asked to shoulder the entire bill for the project, just for the privilege of reading the paper. As I said before, online storage is not free. Why is compensation for related costs to make the paper available a bad thing?

So have publically funded servers for storing this stuff.

 

[beero1000]

lol :hug:

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I think you're missing that in most cases the public is paying for that research so why shouldn't the results of the research they paid for be made available to them?

I don't think anyone is being asked to shoulder the entire bill for the project, just for the privilege of reading the paper. As I said before, online storage is not free. Why is compensation for related costs to make the paper available a bad thing?

I didn't claim it was.

I don't understand why you feel the results of other people's work should be available to you at no charge, with no regard to the effort required to make such work available. Am I missing something?

If you had bothered to educate yourself on the topic you'd understand why that was so funny.

I am well known for my ignorance on these matters, which is why I asked the question. So, do you have an answer?

Read the links in post #10 to get started.

I don't think anyone is being asked to shoulder the entire bill for the project, just for the privilege of reading the paper. As I said before, online storage is not free. Why is compensation for related costs to make the paper available a bad thing?

So have publically funded servers for storing this stuff.

ArXiv.org has a budget of less than 1.5 cents per download. Elsevier has "pledged" that it will reduce its average price per download to only $11. ArXiv is funded by Cornell University and charitable contributions from the Simons foundation, while Elsevier is a private corporation that posts billions in profit. Amazing, right?