In the US, your taxes fund academic research at public universities. Why then do you need to pay expensive, for-profit journals for the results of that research? Erica Stone advocates for a new, open-access relationship between the public and scholars, making the case that academics should publish in more accessible media. "A functioning democracy requires that the public be well-educated and well-informed," Stone says. "Instead of research happening behind paywalls and bureaucracy, wouldn't it be better if it was unfolding right in front of us?"
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First
Very wonderful :-0
If you control the media you control the message and if you control the message you control the world.
It would be amazing if all public funded research would be accessible by the public and there was a funding reward for publishing easily understood summaries for the general public
who named you ya nu?
J Briggs Nobody it’s a fake profile
wow. I feel violated. your life is a lie.
Academia is just generally stuck up its own behind.
The reselling of research to unis is one potential source of rising tuition.
A lot of it is.
all of it is, if you use sci-hub 😉
I wish that I knew something that I could do to help this idea become a reality, and make it a necessity for people who are a part of public funded research to change their mindset, and how they do things, in this way.
Ella Kanefsky call your representative.
I have often tried to find the source of some piece of information only to be meet by a paywall infront of publicly funded data, it seems odd to me that the public does all the labor and the private harvests the fruit.
Abstracts and results are free. If you want the full PEER REVIEWED article, you get to pay the journal for THEIR cost to publish. As mentioned above, the science may be paid for by the public, the process of peer review and the publication is NOT paid for by the public.
True but the cost of publishing and peer rewiev must be a sliver of the cost of the actual research, particularly in online publishing.
slikrx Quite often results aren’t free, just the abstract.
But if even if peer review and publication is tremendously expensive (it’s not by the way) a lot of people distrust science, and refusing to release papers to the general public without pointlessly high paywalls isn’t exactly helping. If more people had incentive and were involved in the process, the public could cover that cost quite easily. WITHOUT forcing people to pay huge amounts of money to view a single article or paper.
use sci-hub 😉 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub
Because the highly skilled job of peer review *isn’t* publicly funded.
And it’s elitism that saves the sciences.
Sandcastle • but it can be made open source like GitHub
But again, the journals PAY for the peer review, and printing, etc. They GET paid via subscriptions and document fees. The vast majority of those journals are self sustaining businesses, and giving away their product (the articles) is suicidal from a business POV.
k4droid 3 no, otherwise what’s the point?
slikrx a time limit on the pay wall could be a good compromise.
Journals have to make research public after X amount of years.
Another reason why this is happening, aside from double billing the public, is that ‘they’ want to keep this information going through their filter. The problem with the truth getting out there, is that it gets in the way of maximizing profits in all kinds of businesses, especially things like the food business.
bingo
She is so right, i found it strange myself to that these researches are all blocked from being public!
Things have already changed a lot in the past few years though. Open access is already a major thing.
I mean, I’m about to get a paper published through a Royal Society of Chemistry journal, and open access is now the standard with them.
They still have to make a profit and pay the reviewers though, so they give the choice between the paper being immediately open access in exchange for a publishing fee, or open access a year after publication otherwise.
“They still have to make a profit and pay the reviewers” I imagine my self saying this about wikipedia, however it does not fit.
In other words, would you like a future where wikipedia will charge you a fee or make you wait a year to opening access to your updates? if yes, then what am I missing out? what makes that theorical wikipedia better than the current one?
Think is. How I can trust media who buy sure only for profit.
Do they mind change facts for profits? Hmmm
There are some good points here but engaging the media and the public are two different things. The media tends to sensationalise scientific research in order to grab the public’s attention and some research published are specific and in depth in a particular field and not all exciting to the media.
Yeah I agree with that.
This is an enlightening goal. I agree that access should be free, and with some training, members of the public could do real, useful work in many areas. They already do in disciplines that require field work.
I’m not so sure about the translation side of things. I guess most areas of research can be translated for the public. But that is a skill in its own right. Very few of us are Sagans or Tysons. We would need to train people to do so. That’s not a bad thing in a democracy.
How about investing in public education to develop science literacy among common people, instead of risking delegitimizing research by incentivizing a sort of “yellow journalism” for researchers? There are literally millions of research articles being produced out there, often with conflicting results, and it takes an effort to seek out the truth, even for the experts. The only ones who would get any media attention would still be those with exaggerated or misconstrued results.. Those prestigious publications are acting as a filter to sort out the articles that are most legitimate and academically profound. If there needs to be a change it’s those of us who read and interpret those articles.
I understand the basic, underlying conept of making the science more accessible, but I don’t think the direction being proposed is a good one.
Cutting edge science is NOT about “making it easily understood”. The whole point is to build the foundation of science and understanding that can be used to further build understanding. This process is done by highly skilled, educated and experienced people. Spending time, resources (and money) to attempt to “translate” a journal article about the protein folding process of a reverse transcriptase study is a complete waste of everyone’s time and money. While not all publicly funded science is that “dense”, a huge portion of it is, and attempting to make everything “accessible” is, simply put, a very bad idea.
Much of the science being done is not intended for public consumption. Not because it’s “secret”, but because the only people who can really make any use of it are folks deeply embedded in the field.
Part of the ongoing problem of “salt is good for you/bad for you/good for you” (or eggs, or chocolate, etc) type of conundrum is that mainstream media types get ahold of some very particular study, paraphrase it without understanding it, or the relevant narrowly defined implications, and then publish yet another contradictory or misguided news story about how XYZ is a good, bad, dangerous, will make you live forever.
What seems to me a MUCH better idea, is that effective science communicators (you know, like 5% of TED talkers) get some public funding to sift through various areas of research, and put together summaries that ARE intended for public consumption. That DO understand the narrow and broad implications of various studies (or are well enough connected to get that info). There are plenty of science communicators making names for themselves here on youtube; Veritasium, Smarter Every Day, PBS Space Time and a host of others.
Expecting the researchers and authors themselves to do this level of work, is simply moronic. Many people go into the hard sciences because they can’t or don’t want, to deal with the general population. (there is a reason the stereotypical nerdy scientist is portrayed as being socially awkward; many are) Or, (as this speaker seems to imply, but never say) having researchers work on science that is of direct interest to the public, is a waste.
slikrx True, but what’s easier? Getting the news to stop being the news or writing a blog post clarifying what your study on caffeine was actually about?
Amen to that! I’m a student so I have access to all kinds of studies. But as soon as I graduate I’m screwed. It’s so messed up that even other scientists don’t have access to these studies.
YES! I have always wondered this and further, wonder why we can’t have a web software to help researchers do open-source research. Is this not the sub-optimal way to improve our understanding of the world?
I’ve always wondered why some studies cost upwards of $250 to download. Publicly funded research SHOULD be publicly available. Even if they just cover the costs of CDN bandwidth, I’d be willing to pay a small amount to access publicly funded scientific studies. Information shouldn’t be such a high cost, especially if it’s already been paid for by public funds!