The problem I have with closed (access) papers

[djacobow]

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.

I cannot speak for all authors but I know my institution, and this behavior is probably the exception not the rule. Some post open-access versions enthusiastically and others do not or do so reticently, often because they would rather people read the published closed paper than some less attractive and finished-looking open access version. It also varies by field. Some fields are insular enough that everyone the author cares about is also an academic, who will generally have institution-level access to the relevant journals. Other fields are more interested in engaging with folks outside the academic universe.

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

If said papers are the product of some research that, for a tiny payment the uni does for a private company, rest assured it won't be seen in any public access repository.

[djacobow]

In said papers are the product of some research that, for a tiny payment the uni does for a private company, rest assured it won't be seen in any public access repository.

It varies by institution. Some might go in for that sort of stuff, but others have the opposite policy: one drop of institutional money and the work is in OA.

[b_force]

I have tried to contact a few people directly, but quite a few send me back to buy the paper.
Maybe that has to do with the fact that they otherwise would violate the rules of the institution?

[djacobow]

I have tried to contact a few people directly, but quite a few send me back to buy the paper.
Maybe that has to do with the fact that they otherwise would violate the rules of the institution?

Or they do not know, or do not care, or can't be bothered, or actively try to subvert their institutions rules, or finding out what they can and cannot do is extra work, etc. I think you will get this kind of response even from researchers at institutions that have open access policies, because, well ... reasons. Let's just say that the joke about herding cats fits perfectly in academic settings.

Oh, another thing about OA policies is that they are generally not retroactive from before the policy. So if the paper is old, it may not be possible to share an open access version.

[exe]

Maybe that has to do with the fact that they otherwise would violate the rules of the institution?

That's weird, in my community this is rare (I'm in cloud computing).

[mbless]

I have tried to contact a few people directly, but quite a few send me back to buy the paper.
Maybe that has to do with the fact that they otherwise would violate the rules of the institution?

For all of the journals I have submitted to, you would violate their copyright by posting the published paper for free, and rest assured they will make you pay for it via legal means. The exception to this is to pay the open access fee that journals are now providing. Of course that option costs $2-3k!

There is a conflict in academia right now between funding and publishing open access. A lot of funding from governing bodies now require the work to be published open access, but no researcher is going to budget $2-3k per a paper to meet the open access requirement. One work around is to post the pre-print version to ResearchGate, but you have to keep in mind that it won't be peer reviewed.

[exe]

One work around is to post the pre-print version to ResearchGate, but you have to keep in mind that it won't be peer reviewed.

Depends on the publisher. Springer does let publishing after the article was peer reviewed, but there is 1 year embargo: https://www.springer.com/gp/open-access/authors-rights/self-archiving-policy/2124 .

There are workarounds for other publishers. Like, making an extended version of the paper (prior it is published) -- creating a derivative work. Of course, the extended version just contained a few more pages with some results that were simply discarded due to insignificance.

[b_force]

I have tried to get an account on ResearchGate, but without an university e-mail that doesn't work.
I contacted them directly, but say "it's not for business and such" 

Also using my private e-mail address and a bogus fake/backup email address don't seem to work.

Talking about profiling and judging people.
They even advertise with that science is for everyone.

[djacobow]

One work around is to post the pre-print version to ResearchGate, but you have to keep in mind that it won't be peer reviewed.

I don't know about the world, but if the US, if the work was covered under an institutional OA policy or was federally funded, you can post the final submitted manuscript or the accepted manuscript to an OA repository. If the journal does peer review, that is a peer-reviewed version.

There is no need to create a special or alternate version of your paper, there is no need to add or remove pages. Just put up the submitted version, and do NOT submit the version that the publisher has created.

For example, here is Elsevier's policy: https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/sharing. It's pretty clear (surprisingly -- clarity is not a hallmark of academic publishers) that the accepted manuscript can always be put on an OA repository. Here is the IEEE's policy: https://www.ieee.org/publications/rights/author-posting-policy.html.


Personally, I would not use ResearchGate as they restrict access to registered users, and that's just an unnecessary restriction they created to garner users. Submit to a legit open access repository. If you work in an academic setting, ask the library what repository they recommend, or use something like arXiv, which does not require any sort of login to see pubs.

You can find OA repositories here: http://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/opendoar/

[mark03]

For all of the journals I have submitted to, you would violate their copyright by posting the published paper for free, and rest assured they will make you pay for it via legal means. The exception to this is to pay the open access fee that journals are now providing. Of course that option costs $2-3k!

I would be very curious to know which journals you're referring to.  I've never heard of even a hint of trouble with researchers posting [submitted] papers on their own web sites, but my experience is mainly limited to IEEE journals.

Also, to second @djacobow, please don't use researchgate.  What a horrible web site.  Bottom feeders trying to monetize the free sharing of information.  What's wrong with arxiv?     Bottom line though, as long as scholar.google.com returns at least one hit for a PDF copy, and anyone can download it immediately without registration, you're good.

[cdev]

If you want to read a paper and its behind a pay-wall, try emailing the author telling them why you want to read it. That works almost all of the time.

Also, although I have not used it there are services like 'deepdyve' which let you subscribe and pay a monthly fee and get to read tons of papers as part of your membership. Also there are professional societies that will give you access to lots of content via your membership.

[Alex]

Just PM me which ones you are interested in.

Alex

[Technobabble_]

These are places I've collected over the years.

1. Sci Hub: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub
2. Library Genesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis This is mostly for books, but papers and academic journals too
3. In the US, some libraries have free JSTOR access; simply connect to wifi
4. ArXiv: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv Only certain fields.
5. ResearchGate: must need .edu address. Sign up for a class at a local community college and get one.
6. NSF Public Access Repository: https://par.nsf.gov/
7. Academia: https://www.academia.edu/ Note: I have not used this service, so I do not know the quality.
8. DOAJ i.e. Directory of Open Access Journals: https://doaj.org/
9. Email the professor!
10. the Directory of Open Access Repositories: http://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/opendoar/

edit: thank you for additions.

[djacobow]

These are places I've collected over the years.

Add the Directory of Open Access Repositories: http://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/opendoar/

These are mostly institutional repositories, so will reflect the pubs that came from the institution. But for some big institutions like the University of California, this is a big trove, and will include open access versions of papers that were not pubished in OA journals.

[Stuart Coyle]

I use this https://unpaywall.org/products/extension to find accessible versions of papers. It is often successful.

[Wan Huang Luo]

Unfortunately I can’t access my papers freely even if I want to thanks to the damn paywall. So as an author I offer condolences. I have to give the society copyright if I want to be published so thems the rules. Ugh. Fail

[knapik]

I hope that this isn't too off topic, but I was wondering if there are ways to freely access standards, especially AS/NZS ones?

[Marco]

I don't know about the world, but if the US, if the work was covered under an institutional OA policy or was federally funded, you can post the final submitted manuscript or the accepted manuscript to an OA repository. If the journal does peer review, that is a peer-reviewed version.

There is no need to create a special or alternate version of your paper, there is no need to add or remove pages. Just put up the submitted version, and do NOT submit the version that the publisher has created.

For example, here is Elsevier's policy: https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/sharing. It's pretty clear (surprisingly -- clarity is not a hallmark of academic publishers) that the accepted manuscript can always be put on an OA repository.

Not really, the author can put it on arXiv or RePEc (neither of which cover all fields, no life sciences except for quantitative biology for instance). They can't put it on any other repository or a public university repository until after the embargo period. This is not by accident, these are simply the exceptions already carved out by superior force. Author homepages and citeseer are inferior ways to access accepted manuscripts than a curated repository ... Elsevier knows that, hence the limitations.

If you want to be able to put accepted manuscripts on any OA repository which accepts it you'll need to apply more force to Elsevier.

[b_force]

I hope that this isn't too off topic, but I was wondering if there are ways to freely access standards, especially AS/NZS ones?

Well, not really unfortunately.
There are "other ways" (if you know what I mean).

This is the second thing besides research papers that is just to bizarre.
We all want that people comply to standards, but apparently to also first have to pay around 200 bucks per standard.
If you're  a bit more serious into electronics you already need around 5-10 standards to work with.
That's quite a bit of money for just a piece of paper.

Yes I know, these things also have to be made and translated, but there are many different ways to pay those people. 

[cdev]

If you can't access the standard, you can't demand that it be followed

[knapik]

I hope that this isn't too off topic, but I was wondering if there are ways to freely access standards, especially AS/NZS ones?

Well, not really unfortunately.
There are "other ways" (if you know what I mean).

This is the second thing besides research papers that is just to bizarre.
We all want that people comply to standards, but apparently to also first have to pay around 200 bucks per standard.
If you're  a bit more serious into electronics you already need around 5-10 standards to work with.
That's quite a bit of money for just a piece of paper.

Yes I know, these things also have to be made and translated, but there are many different ways to pay those people.

I unfortunately don't know of those "other ways".

Last time I tried accessing standards from my university the link was broken, so I just assumed that the monopolised company with the only rights to sell the standards cut off all ties with universities, and not just public libraries, however it seems to be working now. Speaking of those 5-10 standards, would you happen to be able to list out the ones that would be very helpful for me before I complete my degree?

If you can't access the standard, you can't demand that it be followed

Funnily enough, I'm pretty sure that there was a case where a motorcyclist wearing a helmet camera violated Australian standards, very recently and he successfully argued just that.

[xyrtek]

Well, technically this isn't about hardware, but since this is the only forum group that's about open source I think this is the right spot.

As a R&D engineer I am often very interested what is going on around the world with new technology.
As an engineer I also strongly believe in how science works; people postulate an theory, do research to test their theories and share it so everyone else can read if their findings are actually not some kind of scam.
Other people can repeat the experiment to confirm the findings of the paper in question.

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

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

I mean asking pretty pennies for just a paper lowers the credibility pretty significant in my opinion.
Also it makes it a lot less accessible for the bigger audience (officially each individual has to buy his own copy).
Which is particularly annoying with certain myths that are still floating around today.

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

Well, technically this isn't about "Closed Access" anything either. Do you mean Journals and Publishing Companies?

Technically neither the term Open Hardware nor the term Open Software mean its free*.  (think free as in "free speech," not as in "free beer")

Technically calling something Open Access does not auto-magically convert Journals or Publishing Companies to Closed Access.

How long has the term Open Access** been around?



*    https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

** https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/
**  http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm   (FAQ from above link)


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_(journal)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier

[djacobow]

Unfortunately I can’t access my papers freely even if I want to thanks to the damn paywall. So as an author I offer condolences. I have to give the society copyright if I want to be published so thems the rules. Ugh. Fail

This is interesting. I'm sure it varies by publisher. Let's look at three.

1)

This link describes Elsevier's policies, which covers many top journals and whose behavior is considered to be among the most aggressive by publishers: https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/copyright. Their policy clearly states that authors can access their own work, and can even share it for "Scholarly Sharing" even for subscription (non open-access) work.

Also interesting is that if you work for the US government and a few other organizations, the copyright does NOT transfer to Elsevier. The work goes into the public domain.

2)

IEEE's copyright rules are actually worse, IMHO, because they do require transfer of copyright in all cases: https://www.ieee.org/publications/rights/copyright-policy.html

However, even under the IEEE's draconian policy, authors transfer the copyright but are granted rights to use their own papers, make copies, and reuse the material.

3)

The ACM's policy is different still: https://authors.acm.org/main.html. It gives the author the option to transfer copyright to ACM, retain the copyright and give an exclusive license to the ACM, or author pay's to keep all rights and publish in an ACM journal. However, even in the ACM copyright option, the author can still post the pre-print on the authors own home page, institutional repository, or any repository mandated by the agency funding the work, or any non-commercial respository that doesn't try to wholesale copy the ACM.



Anyway, these are just a few examples, but if I had a point it is that policies vary substantially by publisher and you really should take the time to read them. Often, a publisher is not going to proactively inform you of your rights as an author. You've got to read the fine print.

[Masa]

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.

From software features and quality point of view, the business model of the development is what matters a lot.

Most open source projects are very small one or two developer projects, who are developing as a hobby. By other words they only implement the features they are interested in, at the time they need them, there is necessarily no support or bug fix for broken things. Of course it's going to be a crappy user experience compared to a commercially developed software with a lot of resources for development and support.

But those open source projects, that are mostly developed by programmers who get paid for their work (like most Linux kernel developers), will fix bugs faster and have the resources to implement new features faster and a well working "product".

So if the software is developed professionally, it doesn't really matter is it open source or closed source, it still can be high quality. Of course open source provides then other benefits.

The open source model clearly works better in projects, where the software can be used by companies as a part of their own product or service. Like the Linux kernel, or the various very successful open source programming languages and tools.

In most end user GUI applications like KiCad, it is more difficult to come up with a successful business model.