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Comment by Causality1 | Hacker News Reader

It should be a legal requirement that all papers resulting from taxpayer-funded research be open access.

Many European funders, and hopefully soon others as well, are going to mandate exactly that: when you take their funds, you can only publish your work in fully open access journals. See https://www.coalition-s.org/

Agree 100%. It's obviously not possible to dictate what people do with privately funded science, but it's ludicrous that publicly funded research isn't always open-access.

If you get a single cent for your study from tax payers, the tax payers have a right to see the results, with no barriers to access.

I realize it's a barrier, but you can typically contact the researcher directly and get a pre-edited copy as well as supplemental data pretty easily. They're more than happy to share and even schedule calls or in-person meetings to discuss the work.

The share restraint is usually on the edited version journals provide, which frankly, after working on several published papers, isn't much from my experience. The editors don't really prod the theory, methodology or data -- just grammar and formatting (nice but not critical for the science).

This is already true for the NIH in the US, the single largest research funder in the world.

Only after an initial period of exclusivity - I forget whether it's 6 months or 12 months. But even this was an enormous improvement over the status quo.

The NSF, which I think is the second-largest funder of research (or at least basic research) in the US, also requires public access to all publications (after a 12-month embargo, like NIH).

https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2018/nsf18041/nsf18041.jsp#q3

It is notable that these requirements from NSF and NIH have not eliminated many of the complaints about the influence of closed-access journals. Presumably this is because the real issue are the incentives researchers face to publish in such journals regardless of whether they are also publicly available. (Indeed, the vast majority of researchers already have institutional access to closed access journals, and the degree to which non-researchers read research is negligible.)

For some scale: The NIH funds $39B in medical research

https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/budget

The NSF does $7B

https://www.nsf.gov/about/budget/fy2018/

Total funding in the US for basic research (which I think includes about $5B from NSF and $15B from NIH) is $86B

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/data-check-us-governm... https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2017/nsf17316/

More of a stretch, but we should also get rid of copyright overall, so anyone who wants to share any such valuable research or other cultural works can just do so.

If you want to place your work in the public domain, you're free to do so. Copyright law isn't preventing this.

Copyright law certainly has major issues, I'll agree, but it does not prevent you from sharing things if you want to, provided you created them or own them.

> If you want to place your work in the public domain, you're free to do so.

Fun fact: in many places, you actually can't. You can sign over copyright to someone else, or you can give anyone permission to do whatever, but many legal systems have no concept of "disclaiming copyright". You have it, whether you like it or not. This is why it is frequently advised against putting "I put this code in the public domain" as your open source licensing term. It has no legal meaning in many places, which means that it's not properly licensed at all (i.e. full copyright applies).

CC0 is a pretty solid solution to this problem, though.

That won't fly in every journal.

"your work"… thing is, all creativity is derivative. The actual result of "your work" is itself limited when the resources to draw upon exclude all sorts of stuff limited by copyright and patent laws.

I do release everything where I have copyright under free/libre/open terms. But that's not enough to cover the concerns I'm referring to.

I'm saying copyright should be eliminated because it's in the public interest to have more open access (both plainly and for derivative use) to all resrouces

For some journals part of the submission process waives your personal copyright.

That's because, when you give something to someone else, it's not yours any more. This isn't rocket science. Same goes with copyright: if you give your creation away to someone else, it's not yours any more, it's theirs. The simple answer is to not give ownership away to someone if you want to put it in the public domain, or otherwise do something with it that this other party wouldn't agree to.

If you give your car away to someone else, why would you be mad that you can't just use it at random times?

Yes. I agree.

The authors have had the solution in front of them from the beginning. They've been free to send out free copies from the time they finish.

But if they want the advantages that come from journals, well, someone is going to need to pay for them.

If you email any author I guarantee they will send you a PDF of the paper.

> If you email any author I guarantee they will send you a PDF of the paper.

So let us create a website that for a given paywalled URL automatically emails the authors for a PDF. ;-)

I'm pretty sure someone actually did that. Google around for it.

Not all authors will respond to email promptly. And many have retired or even died -- there are decades-old papers still behind paywalls.

It's a beautiful sentiment.

Who's going to pay for the layout and editing and filtering? The people at Elsevier do something for their money.

I'm happy with going to all author-circulated preprints, but I'm afraid that all of the archival work of the journals is a pretty good thing.

I have been publishing at Elsevier, and the editing process was a nightmare. The "layout and editing and filtering" is not performed by skilled editors, it is performed on an Amazon Mechanical Turk level. There was no improvement for the reader over what my co-authors and me had submitted, just a lot of back and forth to prevent numerous new errors to be slipped in.

I'd gladly pay a one-time fee for a good editor to bring a paper into a better shape, to cover these costs.

Ehm... The same people that currently do so at Open Access journals, or at institutional repositories?

In many cases, "layout" is a standard LaTeX/Word template done every few years. "Editing" on text-level is done by the authors, based on feedback from reviewers that aren't paid. Filtering is done based on the same reviewer feedback.

Coordination and archiving are valuable, but don't match the prices asked by some.

Why do we need to pay for expensive layout, in an era where nobody reads the print journal any more? A Word document exported to PDF would work just as well as far as actual science is concerned.

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