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Open Science

Vorpal

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Administrator
The Trump administration is possibly working on an executive order to boost public access to scientific papers that involve public funding:
[E&E, 18 Dec 2019] Though there is generally broad support for public access, publishing groups like the Association of American Publishers worry that a tougher order would upend their subscription-based business model.

Once it caught wind of the effort, AAP began drafting a sharply worded letter of concern to the White House, multiple sources said. The letter could be sent as early as tomorrow.

About a dozen sources told E&E News that they were aware the White House has been considering an executive order but the details remain murky. A senior administration official declined to comment on "internal deliberative processes that may or may not be happening."
It's unclear what if anything is actually going on, but over a hundred publishers are threatened enough to co-sign that letter [pdf] against it. The rumoured executive order may be related to a 2013 memo by the Obama administration that would require such research to be available within a year.

This potentially can make much of SciHub, which is a website that pirates scientific articles, obsolete. Speaking of which, the DoJ is going after its founder:
[WaPo, 19 Dec 2019] The Justice Department is investigating a woman who runs a major Internet piracy operation on suspicion that she may also be working with Russian intelligence to steal U.S. military secrets from defense contractors, according to people familiar with the matter.

Alexandra Elbakyan, a computer programmer born in Kazakhstan, is the creator of Sci-Hub, a website that provides free access to academic papers that are usually available only through expensive subscriptions. Elbakyan's supporters have favorably described her as a "Robin Hood of science."

It's unclear whether Elbakyan is using Sci-Hub's operations in service of Russian intelligence, but her critics say she has demonstrated significant hacking skills by collecting log-in credentials from journal subscribers, particularly at universities, and using them to pilfer vast amounts of academic literature.
I'm very unclear as to whether this hacking involves anything more than asking researchers 'hey, can I has your logins plox?', which is the usual way SciHub got started, as scientists are generally fed up with publishers' strangleholds on their fields and provide it themselves.

As WaPo from 2013 put it:
A growing number of academics believe they have a better way: open access. This approach emphasizes making peer-reviewed research available without restrictions online. It includes pushing for open-access journals with more flexible publishing terms, the creation of institutional repositories that host research produced by faculty, and legislative proposals like requiring federally funded research to be made available to the public within a certain time frame after its publication.

One group advocating for this cause, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), counts nearly 800 academic and research libraries around the world among its ranks. But it's not just about combating the rising costs of journal subscriptions -- many argue that broad dissemination of scholarly works is key to validating the contributions of individual researchers and continuing to build humanity's collective knowledge base.

"Academics are not paid for their journal articles," explains Suber, "they write journal articles entirely for impact or influence, not for money." And while formal peer review prior to publication is valuable, Suber says, the far more important process is the informal vetting papers receive after the fact by "everybody who has access to the paper." The more people who have access to the paper, the more effective that process is.
The interests of the researchers are opposed to those of the publishers, because the former generally benefit when as wide an audience as possible reads their papers, and the system makes them work for the publishers for free (mostly through peer review). On top of that, there's a whole lot of researchers in poorer countries with universities that can't afford to buy off the likes of Elsevier anyway, and SciHub got started by credential trading between people in Kazakhstan, South Africa, etc.
 
This seems like a happy accident, and that nobody should talk too loudly about this development lest the administration realize that people might be able to see the truth about... climate change, or just things in general (Betsy DeVos don't want you knowing the things!). There was such a push to limit access to that information on government websites, I would presume that this is exactly as it appears to be, an oversight where Trumpie forgot to overturn a thing that Obama did.

Though hopefully there is enough distraction with the impeachment-fueled Twitter storm that this gets overlooked and education can happen without knowledge being owned by corrupt corporations. At least for a while, before they buy enough politicians to reverse any progress.
 
The interests of the researchers are opposed to those of the publishers, because the former generally benefit when as wide an audience as possible reads their papers, and the system makes them work for the publishers for free (mostly through peer review). On top of that, there's a whole lot of researchers in poorer countries with universities that can't afford to buy off the likes of Elsevier anyway, and SciHub got started by credential trading between people in Kazakhstan, South Africa, etc.
European Commission actually made a rational decision (for once) in Horizon 2020 - they have ordered that any research funded by H2020 grants (and most likely all EC-funded grant schemas) must be open science, i.e. published in open journals. And (and this is the important part) they actually expect you to ask for money for this publishing in your grant proposal, as most open journals ask for serious publishing fees (since the don't make any money off readers, they must make it off writers, right?).
This way researchers are happy, publishers are happy, and EC pays for it :)
 
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