The problem I have with closed (access) papers

[b_force]

You're not trying to get tenured as a professor.

As if professors are the only one able to bring out papers?
What do you exactly mean with your response?

As mentioned, donations will work extremely well here.
A bit like patreon.

[IanB]

Why it will have no weight if i put on personal website? Any interested reader will eventually found it, this is internet age. If all authors put in personal website and enforce copyright, community will start to realize journal is not the place anymore and will die quicker than you know.

It's about the peer review process. Papers published in journals (are supposed to) go through a rigorous peer review process to separate the wheat from the chaff. A self-published article does not have that same stamp of quality. Furthermore, you will not be able to persuade recognized authorities in the field to review and approve your own work if you are an unknown author.

[Mechatrommer]

@rhb.. If you are, is it worth it? and we have to live with any regulation they (govn, uni or journal) are imposing, if you want something back in return.. i think this is offtopic but anyway the answer is usually $$$, in your case is in exchange with fame..

[JohnG]

I don't like the prices either, and I think they might get more support if they charged something like $5. I lost my access when I left my big company job.

Everyone is free to write whatever they want and put it on the web. That's one of the things that is great about it, but also one of the biggest drawbacks. There is at least a modicum of quality control for IEEE journal papers, they have a good search system, and links to both references and citing papers, which can be very useful when researching a subject (this part is available for free, by the way, and if you still feel cheated, well, there is always sci-hub). Sure, you can find it on the web if you look long and hard enough, and wade through a bunch of crap to find the gems. And, I do this and have found some gems, EEVblog being one of them! But if you do this for a living, it can get very expensive to do much work this way.

For what it's worth, IEEE members can get cheaper access (25 papers a month for $44, 6 month minimum) https://www.ieee.org/membership-catalog/productdetail/showProductDetailPage.html?product=ONLMDL. No, it's not free. But it is at least an attempt to provide reasonable pricing.

But, like I said earlier, it's probably a dying model.

John

[rhb]

My point is simply this:

The current restrictions on access to papers is only possible because there are 20x more PhDs than there are academic positions.  So even allowing for half of them to go into industry, getting a tenured academic post is difficult and is entirely dependent upon how many papers and what journals you have published in.

So the publishers are putting the screws to untenured faculty.  Pay for open access, or we hide your work behind a paywall.  Financial analysts estimate Elsevier's profit margin at 37%.

I'm "retired" because oil prices are low and I terminated my contract in 2007 to look after my parents.  Fortunate timing on my part as I sold my house about 6-8 weeks before the collapse in 2008.  There is no work for oil industry research scientists in their 60s.  Prices are improving, so maybe there is still hope.  But if the work you do is finding oil that costs over $80 to get out of the ground no one wants to do that with oil at $70. I've been through a layoff cycle every 18-24 months my entire career.  Fortunately, I had the sense to be *very* frugal despite making serious money.

I have a negligible publication record.  Most of my career I worked as a contract scientist which made getting permissions almost impossible.

Academia is so corrupt now that they won't even answer emails.  I Have 30 years of PhD level signal processing experience.  I have repeatedly emailed both the professor who teaches a course in DSP and the department secretary to discuss new developments by Donoho and Candes which are, in my opinion,  the greatest work since Wiener and Shannon.  I've never gotten a response.  It will be interesting to see what happens when I telephone.

I did not get my PhD.  After 4 years at UT Austin, my supervisor terminated  my financial support after moving the goal post for 4 years and making me slave to a computer for 3.  In fairness to him, I should note that he was going blind at the time.  I'd already lost over $100K in income as a grad student.  I was not prepared to lose more so I went back to work.  I had acquired the skills that the PhD is expected to confer.  Starting over at Stanford was not worth the loss of $150K of income.  I was not going in to debt, but I was not making money either.

[Bassman59]

You're not trying to get tenured as a professor.

As if professors are the only one able to bring out papers?
What do you exactly mean with your response?

What he is saying is that if you are a post-doc and you want to get a tenured faculty position, you must publish, and by "publish" we mean "published in the specific peer-reviewed journals accepted by tenure committees."

The work can be brilliant and original but if it is not published in the "right" journals, it will be ignored by those who hold the purse-strings and the jobs.

[a59d1]

https://twitter.com/hwitteman/status/1015049411276300289
To quote:

That $35 that scientific journals charge you to read a paper goes 100% to the publisher, 0% to the authors. If you just email us to ask for our papers, we are allowed to send them to you for free, and we will be genuinely delighted to do so

If you think the cost to access is going to the researchers, you've obviously never published anything. Researchers are usually paid by universities. Researchers, with rare exception, have to pay to have their papers published in these for-profit journals owned by Elsevier et al. Universities purchase subscriptions to this journals so anybody on campus can access them without logging in. Anybody who actually pays $35 to access a paper is an utter chump. Use sci-hub.

you said it yourself, so they have to compensate, by charging their years of knowledge and R&D. you should be blessed if they even sell it.

This is so wrong I can't even address it.

mainly due to heavily degraded quality of "open source" product

This is a really, really stupid statement. Yes, some open source projects are utter shit, usually because the founders don't fully open or document them. But Linux/RHEL is far and away the most reliable and efficient OS in the solar system for general use, and has an extraordinarily fast patching system for all kinds of bugs. Python, C, C++, Rust, GCC, Go, Java - these are all tremendously productive and successful products, and they are all essentially full open source with some minor exceptions. KiCAD is getting plausibly close to overtaking Altium in terms of ease-of-use and productivity. I could name thousands of other OS projects.

[Mechatrommer]

Is linux the only one holy grail you are hold on to? I've heard this like 1000 times my entire life, yes linux is fine, but just that. Kicad is supported by cern, before that what? you can name any os you like i can even build one if its worth my time. But how many is success? I know only linux, but i believe it has ecosystem supporting it. How many can follow the model? I can name you many sw (that i consider a failure), or/but not used in pro business. Even kicad is far from discussion among pro, only hobbiests.overtaking altium?  In term of feature? That is daydream talk.

[ChunkyPastaSauce]

One option, if you are lucky enough to be near a US public university or college, you can usually use the library to get access to most papers.

[Mechatrommer]

And linux the pc is in existence since i know how to differentiate red and blue. But until today, it doesnt have support from pro community, hw n sw dev, lack of device driver support and pro sw availability. Geez its like what?  20-30+ years to this date? They are bold.

[Neganur]

One option, if you are lucky enough to be near a US public university or college, you can usually use the library to get access to most papers.

I was wondering the same, I was under the impression that you can access the IEEE database from libraries (don't have to be a student to be a customer at university libraries in Finland).

[ChunkyPastaSauce]

One option, if you are lucky enough to be near a US public university or college, you can usually use the library to get access to most papers.

I was wondering the same, I was under the impression that you can access the IEEE database from libraries (don't have to be a student to be a customer at university libraries in Finland).

The university library near me, IEEE is definitely accessible to public.

[Navarro]

Unfortunately, what happens quiet often is that people first need to pay a pretty hefty commission to join some kind of society in the first place.

ieee community doesnt seem too bad, student membership is about $10-20..

Second is that a lot of times papers are easily 5-20 bucks each!

those people got to eat what do you expect? put it to yourself, are you willing to do charity work while at the same time eating grass?

Of course research isn't free and costs are being made.

you said it yourself, so they have to compensate, by charging their years of knowledge and R&D. you should be blessed if they even sell it.

But isn't this going right against the whole idea of science; sharing your findings with the world so the rest of the world can criticize it?

they share it with the people they know, not some random people that could possibly a maniac or KGB, "criticize" is an ideal term, in reality it can be misused, a free shortcut to the next development etc etc.

I do see "open access" papers popping up more often, but still a significant amount people need to pay for it.

usually free access is to the well known knowledge, proven since some decades back. paid papers usually enhancement or specialization of that general knowledge thats been done recently by some usually small group of research team or individuals. it costed money to do the research why do you expect free meal from them? for sensitive cutting edge military grade technologies, just dream on acquiring that type of knowledge even if you have 7 digit money in your pocket.

We don't get a SINGLE cent out of published papers. Only the publisher is the one which gets money out of it.

[rhb]

"Open Access Papers" require the authors to pay from $100 to $5000 to allow open access.  Read any of the publishers web pages on "Article Publication Charges".  Twenty years ago "Open Access" did not exist.  Authors paid page charges and readers paid paper charges.

Yes, it's completely insane and the exact opposite of what science is supposed to be.  But that is the situation.  The publishers want their 30+% profit margins and either the authors, readers or both must pay.

[b_force]

One option, if you are lucky enough to be near a US public university or college, you can usually use the library to get access to most papers.

I was wondering the same, I was under the impression that you can access the IEEE database from libraries (don't have to be a student to be a customer at university libraries in Finland).

The university library near me, IEEE is definitely accessible to public.

That is only IEEE, there are a billion other organizations.
Also, I see that as a workaround, not as a real solution.
Open to the public means people are able to access it from wherever they want.
You can't use a computer at the library here anymore without a membership for example.

[Neganur]

Apologies in advance, I don't mean to be pedantic.

Does 'open to the public' exclude illiterate people then?

I for one would like to believe that being available in a public library fulfills the definition of 'open to the public'. Usually library membership is free of charge, and at least the library I use offers their entire database (the material that is available in digital form) to my computer at home or onto my tablet/cellphone. And the stuff that doesn't exist in digital form I can ask to loan, or if it is rare request a photocopy (for a modest fee).

I really hope that other countries' libraries offer similar services. I would gladly pay 1% more in tax for this.

EDIT: But to address your original post; I agree with you that the science/research should be public documents with the exception of classified as confidential (by law) information.

[mark03]

The other ridiculous thing is that a big chunk (majority?) of the research getting published is supported by public grants.  In the United States that means NSF (Natl. Science Foundation), NIH (Natl. Institutes of Health), DOD (Dept. of Defense), and so on.  Thus, not only are the publishers asking extortionate rates for access to the research, money which goes 100% to the publisher, not the authors nor the peer reviewers nor the volunteer journal editors nor the universities; the icing on the cake is that YOU HAVE ALREADY PAID FOR THIS RESEARCH through your tax dollars

To their credit, a handful of public funding agencies have instituted mandatory open access requirements.  This is mostly in biomedical research, and seems not to have touched most of what gets published in IEEE journals.

Seriously, just use Sci-Hub!  Consider it training on the difference between legality and morality.  And if you are currently in academia, please make sure that all of your publications are freely available in PDF format on your university's web site, or your own.  (These should be "preprints", although I have never heard of action taken against a researcher by the IEEE regardless.)  Mass public disobedience is the only way this situation is going to change.

(my credibility: PhD in EE and several papers in IEEE journals)

[JohnG]

The other ridiculous thing is that a big chunk (majority?) of the research getting published is supported by public grants.  In the United States that means NSF (Natl. Science Foundation), NIH (Natl. Institutes of Health), DOD (Dept. of Defense), and so on.  Thus, not only are the publishers asking extortionate rates for access to the research, money which goes 100% to the publisher, not the authors nor the peer reviewers nor the volunteer journal editors nor the universities; the icing on the cake is that YOU HAVE ALREADY PAID FOR THIS RESEARCH through your tax dollars

To their credit, a handful of public funding agencies have instituted mandatory open access requirements.  This is mostly in biomedical research, and seems not to have touched most of what gets published in IEEE journals.

Seriously, just use Sci-Hub!  Consider it training on the difference between legality and morality.  And if you are currently in academia, please make sure that all of your publications are freely available in PDF format on your university's web site, or your own.  (These should be "preprints", although I have never heard of action taken against a researcher by the IEEE regardless.)  Mass public disobedience is the only way this situation is going to change.

(my credibility: PhD in EE and several papers in IEEE journals)

Well said!

[RoGeorge]

[Pack34]

Has no one here mentioned contacting the authors directly and requesting a copy? A lot of the time they don't receive anything of significance when you purchase through a directory. They may be happy to email a PDF. It all boils down to whatever agreement they made with the IEEE for their paper.

[IanB]

Has no one here mentioned contacting the authors directly and requesting a copy?

Yes, that has been mentioned. Often that is the best way.

[b_force]

Has no one here mentioned contacting the authors directly and requesting a copy? A lot of the time they don't receive anything of significance when you purchase through a directory. They may be happy to email a PDF. It all boils down to whatever agreement they made with the IEEE for their paper.

Yes a few times and they often refer to the website to buy them.

[pamperchu]

There are some great "paper" search engines that are only accessible via Tor,  not to hard to look up the .onion URL

[djacobow]

Take some heart, the situation is going to improve, perhaps slowly.

I manage open-access compliance for a US national laboratory. As a result of a presidential directive (https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ostp_public_access_memo_2013.pdf), the DOE requires that all academic work (all "scientific and technical information") funded by the DOE be made open access. (https://www.energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan)  What this usually means for something that was published in a closed journal is that the final published version is not made available, but the author's final manuscript, which will typically have the same content but without some formatting. The Labs are slowly coming into compliance, but it will take time. I know the DOE requirement the best, but it is my understanding that the presidential directive applies widely to almost all federally funded research. You can find US DOE work here: https://www.osti.gov/pages/

Some US states have similar requirements for research they have funded, as do some universities. For example, the University of California system requires all work from academic senate faculty to be made available for open access. However, that policy will soon be expanding to include work from staff, grad students, postdocs, etc. (https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/open-access-policy/policy-text/presidential/). You can find UC work here: https://escholarship.org/.

Furthermore, a similar requirement exists in other countries, and I think there is an EU mandate of some kind, too. I don't know the details of how that works. (https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/open-access-scientific-information)

Best,
Dave

[exe]

Didn't read the whole thread, but, just in case, almost all authors put their papers for free online (to make it more available, get move visibility, citations, etc). Publishers may put some restrictions (like, they may not allow to put the final version, etc). Try using scholar.google.com.