It's Time For The Academic World To See The Positive Side Of Negative Results

from the go-on,-take-a-chance dept

Techdirt has written many times about the need to move from traditional academic publishing to open access. There are many benefits, including increasing the reach and impact of research, and allowing members of the public to read work that they have often funded, without needing to pay again. But open access is not a panacea; it does not solve all the problems of today's approach to spreading knowledge. In particular, it suffers from the same serious flaw that afflicts traditional titles: a tendency to focus on success, and to draw a veil of silence over failure. As a new column in Nature puts it:

Scientists have become so accustomed to celebrating only success that we've forgotten that most technological advances stem from failure. We all want to see our work saving lives or solving world hunger, and I think the collective bias towards finding positive results in the face of failure is a dangerous motivation.

That's true, though hardly a new insight. People have been pointing it out for years. But the fact that it still needs to be said shows how little progress has been made in this regard. For example, back in 2015, Stephen Curry, a professor of structural biology at London's Imperial College, wrote a column in the Guardian entitled "On the importance of being negative", which explains why negative results matter:

Their value lies in mapping out blind alleys, warning other investigators not to waste their time or at least to tread carefully. The only trouble is, it can be hard to get them published.

Curry noted that Elsevier was aiming to address that problem with the launch of the catchily-named journal "New Negatives in Plant Science", which was "a platform for negative, unexpected or controversial results". Unfortunately, looking at the journal's Web page today, we read: "The Publisher has decided to discontinue the journal New Negatives in Plant Science." Maybe papers about negative results were simply a bit, well, negative for many people. Undaunted, Cambridge University Press (CUP) is launching its own title in this space:

Experimental Results will offer a place where researchers can publish standalone experimental results "regardless of whether those results are novel, inconclusive, negative or supplementary to other published work." The journal will also publish the outcome of attempts to reproduce previously published experiments, including those that dispute past findings.

Some journals publish full-paper negative or inconclusive results, but published stand-alone results are a rarity, said CUP.

That's a welcome move, because the academic world effectively discards huge quantities of knowledge, often hard-won, about things that don't work, don't reproduce the results of others, or are simply unclear. Those may be messy and less glamorous than the big successes that hit the headlines and win prizes, but they are valuable nonetheless.

It's instructive to compare the world of academic publishing with what happens in Silicon Valley. There, failure is celebrated as proof that entrepreneurs have been willing to try new things, and acknowledged as a valuable learning experience. It's added to CVs with pride, not glossed over like some shameful secret. It's time to bring some of that enthusiastic willingness to take risks to the rigorous but rather timid world of academia. -- and to reward it accordingly.

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Filed Under: academia, failure, journals, open access, research

Why Carl Malamud's Latest Brilliant Project, To Mine The World's Research Papers, Is Based In India

from the sci-hub-to-the-rescue-again dept

Carl Malamud is one of Techdirt's heroes. We've been writing about his campaign to liberate US government documents and information for over ten years now. The journal Nature has a report on a new project of his, which is in quite a different field: academic knowledge. The idea will be familiar to readers of this site: to carry out text and data mining (TDM) on millions of academic articles, in order to discover new knowledge. It's a proven technique with huge potential to produce important discoveries. That raises the obvious question: if large-scale TDM of academic papers is so powerful, why hasn't it been done before? The answer, as is so often the case, is that copyright gets in the way. Academic publishers use it to control and impede how researchers can help humanity:

[Malamud's] unprecedented project is generating much excitement because it could, for the first time, open up vast swathes of the paywalled literature for easy computerized analysis. Dozens of research groups already mine papers to build databases of genes and chemicals, map associations between proteins and diseases, and generate useful scientific hypotheses. But publishers control -- and often limit -- the speed and scope of such projects, which typically confine themselves to abstracts, not full text.

Malamud's project gets around the limitations imposed by copyright and publishers thanks to two unique features. First, Malamud "had come into possession (he won't say how) of eight hard drives containing millions of journal articles from Sci-Hub". Drawing on Sci-Hub's huge holdings means his project doesn't need to go begging to publishers in order to obtain full texts to be mined. Secondly, Malamud is basing his project in India:

Over the past year, Malamud has -- without asking publishers -- teamed up with Indian researchers to build a gigantic store of text and images extracted from 73 million journal articles dating from 1847 up to the present day. The cache, which is still being created, will be kept on a 576-terabyte storage facility at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi.

India was chosen because of an important court battle that concluded two years ago. As Techdirt reported then, it is legal in India to make photocopies of copyright material in an educational context. Malamud's contention is that this allows him to mine academic material in India without the permission of publishers. But he also believes that his TDM project would be legal in the US:

The data mining, he says, is non-consumptive: a technical term meaning that researchers don't read or display large portions of the works they are analysing. "You cannot punch in a DOI [article identifier] and pull out the article," he says. Malamud argues that it is legally permissible to do such mining on copyrighted content in countries such as the United States. In 2015, for instance, a US court cleared Google Books of copyright infringement charges after it did something similar to the JNU depot: scanning thousands of copyrighted books without buying the rights to do so, and displaying snippets from these books as part of its search service, but not allowing them to be downloaded or read in their entirety by a human.

The fact that TDM is "non-consumptive" means that the unhelpful attitude of academic publishers is even more unjustified than usual. They lose nothing from the analytical process, which is merely extracting knowledge. But from a sense of entitlement publishers still demand to be paid for unrestricted computer access to texts that have already been licensed by academic institutions anyway. That selfish and obstructive attitude to TDM may be about to backfire spectacularly. The Nature article notes:

No one will be allowed to read or download work from the repository, because that would breach publishers' copyright. Instead, Malamud envisages, researchers could crawl over its text and data with computer software, scanning through the world's scientific literature to pull out insights without actually reading the text.

The thing is, if anyone were by any chance interested in reading the full text, there's an obvious place to turn to. After all, the mining is carried out using papers held by Sci-Hub, so…

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Filed Under: academic papers, carl malamud, copyright, india, journals, research, science, tdm, text and data mining
Companies: sci-hub

Move By Top Chinese University Could Mean Journal Impact Factors Begin To Lose Their Influence

from the and-no-bad-thing,-either dept

The so-called "impact factors" of journals play a major role in the academic world. And yet people have been warning about their deep flaws for many years. Here, for example, is Professor Stephen Curry, a leading advocate of open access, writing on the topic back in 2012:

I am sick of impact factors and so is science.

The impact factor might have started out as a good idea, but its time has come and gone. Conceived by Eugene Garfield in the 1970s as a useful tool for research libraries to judge the relative merits of journals when allocating their subscription budgets, the impact factor is calculated annually as the mean number of citations to articles published in any given journal in the two preceding years.

The rest of that article and the 233 comments that follow it explain in detail why impact factors are a problem, and why they need to be discarded. The hard part is coming up with other ways of gauging the influence of people who write in high-profile publications -- one of the main reasons why many academics cling to the impact factor system. A story in Nature reports on a bold idea from a top Chinese university in this area:

One of China's most prestigious universities plans to give some articles in newspapers and posts on major social-media outlets the same weight as peer-reviewed publications when it evaluates researchers.

It will work like this:

articles have to be original, written by the researcher and at least 1,000 words long; they need to be picked up by major news outlets and widely disseminated through social media; and they need to have been seen by a large number of people. The policy requires an article to be viewed more than 100,000 times on WeChat, China's most popular instant-messaging service, or 400,000 times on news aggregators such as Toutiao. Articles that meet the criteria will be considered publications, alongside papers in peer-reviewed journals.

The university has also established a publication hierarchy, with official media outlets such as the People's Daily considered most important, regional newspapers and magazines occupying a second tier, and online news sites such as Sina, NetEase or Sohu ranking third./blockquote>

One of the advantages of this idea is that it recognizes that publishing in non-academic titles can be just as valid as appearing in conventional peer-reviewed journals. It also has the big benefit of encouraging academics to communicate with the public -- something that happens too rarely at the moment. That, in its turn, might help experts learn how to explain their often complex work in simple terms. At the same time, it would allow non-experts to hear about exciting new ideas straight from the top people in the field, rather than mediated through journalists, who may misunderstand or distort various aspects.

However, there are clear risks, too. For example, there is a danger that newspapers and magazines will be unwilling to accept articles about difficult work, or from controversial academics. Equally, mediocre researchers that hew to the government line may benefit from increased exposure, even resulting in them being promoted ahead of other, more independent-minded academics. Those are certainly issues. But what's interesting here is not just the details of the policy itself, but the fact that it was devised and is being tried in China. That's another sign that the country is increasingly a leader in many areas, and no longer a follower.

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Filed Under: academic research, china, impact factors, journals, open access, peer review

Not Just Academics Fed Up With Elsevier: Entire Editorial Staff Resigns En Masse To Start Open Access Journal

from the good-for-them dept

It's really somewhat astounding just how absolutely hated journal publishing giant Elsevier has become in certain academic circles. The company seems to have perfected its role of being about as evil as possible in trying to lock up knowledge and making it expensive and difficult to access. A few years ago, we noted that a bunch of academics were banding together to boycott journals published by the company, as more and more people were looking at open access journals, allowing them to more freely share their research, rather than locking it up. Elsevier's response has been to basically crack down on efforts to share knowledge. The company has been known to charge for open access research -- sometimes even buying up journals and ignoring the open licenses on the works. The company has also been demanding professors takedown copies of their own research. Because how dare anyone actually benefit from knowledge without paying Elsevier its toll. And that's not even mentioning Elsevier's history of publishing fake journals as a way to help giant pharmaceutical companies pretend their treatments were effective.

Basically on the list of companies which really are pushing to get themselves declared "evil," Elsevier has a prime spot.

And now even its employees are revolting. The editorial staff of an Elsevier journal have all resigned to go start an open access journal instead:

All six editors and all 31 editorial board members of Lingua, one of the top journals in linguistics, last week resigned to protest Elsevier's policies on pricing and its refusal to convert the journal to an open-access publication that would be free online. As soon as January, when the departing editors' noncompete contracts expire, they plan to start a new open-access journal to be called Glossa.

The editors and editorial board members quit, they say, after telling Elsevier of the frustrations of libraries reporting that they could not afford to subscribe to the journal and in some cases couldn't even figure out what it would cost to subscribe. Prices quoted on the Elsevier website suggest that an academic library in the United States with a total student and faculty full-time equivalent number of around 10,000 would pay $2,211 for shared online access, and $1,966 for a print copy.

One of the editors who quit notes that he'd "be better off going to flip burgers" in the time he spent working for the journal, rather than accepting the tiny amount Elsevier pays him.

While this may seem like a specific kind of dispute focused in the academic world, what's incredible is it shows just how far copyright has moved from its original purpose and intent. The original copyright laws were officially focused on this kind of research. The US's first copyright law was specific that it was an act for "the encouragement of learning." And the use of "science" in the Constitutional copyright clause actually meant "learning" at the time it was written. Copyright was supposed to be about encouraging people to share information for educational/learning purposes.

And now it's being used for exactly the opposite. And in these cases it's certainly not (at all) about compensating content creators. Academic authors don't get paid for their research papers -- and in some areas they even have to pay to submit it to these journals. And companies like Elsevier get tons of free or cheap labor as well. Peer review is generally done for free. The article notes that the executive editor of the journal is paid only $5,000 per year. And yet the company wants to charge libraries thousands of dollars to access it?

It's a total scam.

And, worse, it's a scam where all of us are the victims. The sharing of knowledge and the ability to learn from others and to build on their works is a core aspect of how learning, science and education advance. And Elsevier has rejected all of that in favor of fat profits -- something it can only do because of our totally screwed up copyright laws. Having the editorial staff here resign is a really strong public message that hopefully people take notice of.

In the meantime, however, Elsevier should be Exhibit A in how copyright is abused to stifle learning which is completely opposed to its Constitutional purpose.

Filed Under: copyright, education, glossa, journals, learning, lingua, literary journal, open access
Companies: elsevier

Copyright Fail: 'Pirating' Academic Papers Not Only Commonplace, But Now Seen As Mainstream

from the icanhaz-#icanhazpdf dept

Techdirt has been writing about open access for many years. The idea and practice are certainly spreading, but they're spreading more slowly than many in the academic world had hoped. That's particularly frustrating when you're a researcher who can't find a particular academic paper freely available as open access, and you really need it now. So it's no surprise that people resort to other methods, like asking around if anyone has a copy they could send. The Internet being the Internet, it's also no surprise that this ad-hoc practice has evolved into a formalized system, using Twitter and the hashtag #icanhazpdf to ask other researchers if they have a copy of the article in question. But what is surprising is that recently there have been two articles on mainstream sites that treat the approach as if it's really quite a reasonable thing to do. Here's Quartz:

Most academic journals charge expensive subscriptions and, for those without a login, fees of $30 or more per article. Now academics are using the hashtag #icanhazpdf to freely share copyrighted papers.

Scientists are tweeting a link of the paywalled article along with their email address in the hashtag -- a riff on the infamous meme of a fluffy cat’s "I Can Has Cheezburger?" line. Someone else who does have access to the article downloads a pdf of the paper and emails the file to the person requesting it. The initial tweet is then deleted as soon as the requester receives the file.

And here's BBC News:

In many countries, it's against the law to download copyrighted material without paying for it -- whether it's a music track, a movie, or an academic paper. Published research is protected by the same laws, and access is generally restricted to scientists -- or institutions -- who subscribe to journals.

But some scientists argue that their need to access the latest knowledge justifies flouting the law, and they're using a Twitter hashtag to help pirate scientific papers.

Both stories go on to give some background to the approach and its hashtag. But what's striking is that after mentioning that this kind of activity may be against the law, there's none of the traditional hand-wringing about "piracy", and how it will end Western civilization as we know it unless tough measures are brought in to stop it.

It's surely no accident that this novel relaxed attitude to sharing materials covered by copyright concerns academic papers. After all, such sharing lies at the heart of research, which derives much of its power from the fact that people can build on what has been found before, rather than being forced to re-discover old knowledge. The idea of locking away that knowledge behind paywalls, and making it hard for any researcher to access it, is so self-evidently absurd, that even mainstream publications like Quartz or BBC News apparently have no difficulty accepting that viewpoint, implicitly through their coverage, if not explicitly. It's a further sign of copyright's dwindling relevance in a world whose central technology -- the Internet -- is built on sharing and openness.

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Filed Under: academics, copyright, journals, knowledge, open access, papers, research, sharing

New Boycott In Support Of Open Access: Third Time Lucky?

from the idea-whose-time-has-come dept

Over three years ago, we wrote about a fast-growing boycott of the academic publisher Elsevier, organised in protest at that company's high prices, its "bundling" of journals into larger collections, and its support for SOPA. Even though over 15,000 people eventually pledged not to work with Elsevier, the company is still going strong, making huge profits from the work of academics, and putting paywalls between the public and knowledge. Perhaps we should have guessed it would end like that. As we noted then, this was not the first or biggest boycott in the history of open access. In 2000, 34,000 scientists from 180 nations signed up to the following:

we pledge that, beginning in September 2001, we will publish in, edit or review for, and personally subscribe to only those scholarly and scientific journals that have agreed to grant unrestricted free distribution rights to any and all original research reports that they have published, through PubMed Central and similar online public resources, within 6 months of their initial publication date.

The failure by many of them to follow through on that promise did have one positive effect: it led to the creation of what remains perhaps the most influential open access publisher, the Public Library of Science, which is still around today, and flourishing. Both of these unsuccessful attempts to use boycotts to push forward open access are mentioned in a post by Dr Danny Kingsley on the Unlocking Research blog, which reports on yet another attempt to use this approach:

A long running dispute between Dutch universities and Elsevier has taken an interesting turn. Yesterday Koen Becking, chairman of the Executive Board of Tilburg University who has been negotiating with scientific publishers about an open access policy on behalf of Dutch universities with his colleague Gerard Meijer, announced a plan to start boycotting Elsevier.

As a first step in boycotting the publisher, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) has asked all scientists that are editor in chief of a journal published by Elsevier to give up their post. If this way of putting pressure on the publishers does not work, the next step would be to ask reviewers to stop working for Elsevier. After that, scientists could be asked to stop publishing in Elsevier journals.

And here's why Kingsley thinks this time the boycott might work:

Typically negotiations with publishers occur at an institutional level and with representatives from the university libraries. This makes sense as libraries have long standing relationships with publishers and understand the minutiae of the licencing processes . However the Dutch negotiations have been led by the Vice Chancellors of the universities. It is a country-wide negotiation at the highest level. And Vice Chancellors have the ability to request behaviour change of their research communities.

That exposes what went wrong with the previous boycotts: they were carried out by the researchers, who have very little clout individually or even collectively when it comes to putting pressure on huge companies like Elsevier. But the Vice Chancellors have real power, based on the ability to instruct their respective institutions how they should -- or shouldn't -- act, including, presumably, how they spend their money on journal subscriptions.

The Dutch seem to be serious about making open access the norm in their country. A recent amendment to the country's copyright act means that authors are now entitled by law to make the results of their research available under open access licenses. As a short notice on the University of Utrecht site explains:

This means that university staff no longer have to lay down the right to publish open access in agreements with publishers. After the amendment of the law they have and keep this right automatically. With the publisher they only have to reach an agreement on the length of 'a reasonable period of time'.

Even without the boycott, then, Elsevier will be obliged to agree to release research that is completely or partly paid for by the Dutch government as open access after that "reasonable period of time." All-in-all, now might be a good moment for the company to take a more accommodating approach to open access than it has in the past.

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Filed Under: academic journals, boycott, journals, open access
Companies: elsevier

DailyDirt: Problems With Peer Reviewed Publications

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Peer review isn't exactly a sexy topic, but it's an essential part of academic publishing -- and it may need to change a bit to keep up with the times. Peer review is typically a thankless chore that is distributed among academics working in a network of related fields, and sometimes personal politics can enter into the process if the subject matter is obscure enough. Misconduct in peer review doesn't usually get the same kind of coverage as various journalistic scandals (eg. Rolling Stone, Buzzfeed, etc), but the damages done can be even more significant to society.

• Peer review processes aren't free of corruption -- with some third party agencies offering services that fake reviews or try to improve a paper's odds of being published in other unsavory ways. The publication system for scientific work doesn't seem to have a great way to deal with this issue besides retracting (instead of correcting) articles published in error. Dozens of papers have been retracted by BioMed Central recently, but the problems with peer review appear to be much more widespread. [url]
• Some scientific papers are published for a fee -- with absolutely no quality control whatsoever. The impressively-titled International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology accepted a paper that consisted of nothing but "Get me off your fucking mailing list" repeated over and over. [url]
• Paying for expedited peer review sounds sketchy, right? Rubriq's peer-review service promised a review within 3 weeks or your money back -- but perhaps these kinds of services should be subject to yet another round of reviews. [url]
• Can publishers try to automate the detection of fake papers and poorly-reviewed articles before they turn into embarrassing mistakes? Artificial intelligence just isn't that good, but perhaps software will make it harder for people to detect shady predatory publications. [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: academia, journals, media, natural language processing, peer review, publications, retractions, rubriq, scandals

Is It Acceptable For Academics To Pay For Privatized, Expedited Peer Review?

from the bumps-along-the-way dept

Academic publishing is going through a turbulent time, not least because of the rise of open access, which disrupts the traditional model in key ways. But in one respect, open access is just like the old-style academic publishing it is replacing: it generally employs peer review to decide whether papers should be accepted, although there are some moves to open up peer review too. As this story from Science makes clear, commercial publishers are innovating here as well, although not always in ways that academics like:

An editor of Scientific Reports, one of Nature Publishing Group's (NPG's) open-access journals, has resigned in a very public protest of NPG's recent decision to allow authors to pay money to expedite peer review of their submitted papers.

According to the Science article, there are now several companies making millions of dollars from this kind of privatized, expedited peer review. Here's more about Research Square, the one employed by NPG:

"We have about 100 employees with Ph.D.s,” says Research Square’s CEO, Shashi Mudunuri. That small army of editors recruits scientists around the world as reviewers, guiding the papers through the review process. The reviewers get paid $100 for each completed review. The review process itself is also streamlined, using an online "scorecard" instead of the traditional approach of comments, questions, and suggestions.

Authors pay $750 to NPG, and are guaranteed a review within three weeks or they get their money back. Research Square seems to be flourishing:

So far, Mudunuri says, the company has about 1400 active reviewers who have scored 920 papers. The company pulled in $20 million in revenue last year.

Still, the question has to be whether this leads to key benefits of the peer review process being lost. After all, the system is not just about accepting or rejecting papers. The NPG editor who resigned, Professor Mark Maslin, is quoted as saying:

"Deep consideration and a well thought out review is much more important than its speed. I have had brilliant reviews which have considerably improved my papers and I really appreciated all the time taken."

The other issue is that the expedited, paid-for route is discriminatory:

"My objections are that it sets up a two-tiered system and instead of the best science being published in a timely fashion it will further shift the balance to well-funded labs and groups," Mark Maslin, a biogeographer at University College London, tells ScienceInsider. "Academic Publishing is going through a revolution and we should expect some bumps along the way. This was just one that I felt I could not accept."

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Filed Under: class system, fast lane, journals, peer review, prioritized review, research, science, two tier system

DailyDirt: Science With (And Without) Verification

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The scientific method has undoubtedly advanced the growth of knowledge, but with the enormous amount of data that can be collected now, it can be difficult to turn all that information into reliable and understandable facts. On the other hand, science is also pushing the boundaries of what can possibly be measured -- but can we still call it science if we're proposing unknowable multiverses and spatial dimensions that can never be explored? Almost anyone can publish their crazy ideas -- and sometimes those sketchy papers submitted to arxiv.org lead to successful work proving an infinite number of twin primes. Do the crackpots outnumber the "real" scientists? Does it matter?

• Advances in cosmology are pulling away from experimental verification. Some theorists argue that their theories to explain the universe may not be verifiable by observations -- and that it doesn't matter. They assert we're in a "post-empirical" period for understanding fundamental physics. [url]
• Verification of experimental results is a fundamental aspect of science, right? Providing more funding for researchers to perform replication experiments may be increasingly necessary to ensure our scientific knowledge isn't merely based on anecdotes (or bad experiments or biased analysis). [url]
• Will traditional scholarly journals have a future? There's a growing movement to decentralize the peer review and publication process that doesn't require a for-profit scholarly journal. Yay? [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: arxiv, cosmology, crackpots, experiments, journals, knowledge, multiverses, peer review, physics, prime numbers, replication, science, scientific method, verification

Nature Drops Its Paywall... But Replaces It With Insane, Anti-Research Proprietary DRM

from the screw-you,-researchers dept

We've written plenty about open access and how the big scientific journals profit off of publicly funded research by putting it behind a paywall, thereby greatly limiting the ability of knowledge (often paid for with our tax dollars) to be used to further discovery, research and innovation. The impact on society is tremendous, and unfortunate.

In the science realm, there are two "big" journal publishers: Nature and Science. If you're an academic releasing a scientific paper, those tend to be the two journals you most want your papers to appear in. So, it seemed like good news when Nature claimed it was moving away from a paywall and going to allow open access to the research papers it publishes. But the details suggest that whoever came up with this plan did it for the stupidest of reasons. Nature's own report on this change of plans kicks off by highlighting how ridiculously limited and encumbered with DRM this new offering will be:

All research papers from Nature will be made free to read in a proprietary screen-view format that can be annotated but not copied, printed or downloaded, the journal’s publisher Macmillan announced on 2 December.

Well, even that's an exaggeration. The full press release notes that it's not that everything will be "free to read" but rather that those who do subscribe will be able to freely "share" the works (in this annoying, limited, proprietary DRM manner). Also "100 media outlets and blogs" will be given access as well, so that they can also share the works in this annoying, limited proprietary way:

Subscribers to 49 journals on nature.com will be able to share a unique URL to a full text, read-only version of published scientific research with colleagues or collaborators in the most convenient way for them, e.g. via email and social media. Included are the world's most cited scientific publication, Nature; the Nature family of journals and fifteen other quality science journals. This new initiative will be available to scientists and students at more than 6,000 universities and organizations worldwide, and serve the more 10 million monthly unique visitors to nature.com. This sharing is intended for personal, non-commercial use. To further aid collaboration, forthcoming annotation functionality will enable subscribers to share comments and highlighted text with their colleagues.

100 media outlets and blogs across the globe that report on the findings of articles published on nature.com will be able to provide their own readers with a link to a full text, read-only view of the original scientific paper. Thousands of high-quality scientific papers will be available. Nature has published some of the leading scientific stories of our time, such as the Human Genome; the structure of DNA; Dolly the Sheep; the invention of the laser; the identification of the AIDS virus and the discovery of the hole in the ozone layer.

Is this more open than the full paywall? Sure. But, it's such a hamfisted way of "opening up" that it makes things even more annoying. If you can't download, copy or print the text -- and you have to install annoying proprietary software -- it makes it a hell of a lot harder for researchers to actually make use of the text to, you know, contribute to their own research. Of course, the announcement also notes that Nature's owner, Macmillan, just happens to have a "majority investment" in ReadCube, the proprietary DRM platform that the company is using.

In other words, this has little to do with true open access. Instead, it's a rather cynical attempt to pretend to be open access, while trying to pump up its own investment in some crappy DRM system. So, sure, kudos for taking a layer off the top of the paywall, but this is hardly a revolutionary step. It still seems very much designed to make it as annoying and inconvenient as possible to actually share knowledge. I mean, this is the very same Nature that, just months ago, was trying to pressure researchers from universities that had open access policies to get those universities to waive those policies when seeking to get published in Nature...

Filed Under: copying, copyright, drm, journals, nature, paywall, readcube, research, science, scientists
Companies: macmillan, nature