Mastodawn

SharpLorren Aug 16, 2023

Dr. Casey Fiesler

Academics, I beg you. Please put copies of your published papers on your website, arxiv, whatever. Not only because it's great for the broader world beyond academia (who can't get behind paywalls at all) but it just took me 15 minutes to try to figure out how to log in to some particular database to get a copy of a paper. I don't even like the 3 minutes it takes to log into the ACM DL versus copying a title into google. Follow copyright rules but you can almost always post SOMETHING somewhere.

Nicholas Weaver Aug 16, 2023

@cfiesler
Additionally, even the biggest aholes like Springer would blanch at trying to enforce copyright on your papers that you put on your web site.

Because they know that if they started enforcing that they would die as nobody would ever publish with them again.

Dr. Casey Fiesler Aug 16, 2023

@ncweaver Even the publishers that technically don't allow you to post the "final" version of the paper are typically fine with a pre-formatted version though.

Though also you're probably right. :)

Dan Hatton Aug 16, 2023

@cfiesler Springer, Elsevier, and Institute of Physics Publishing all have licence terms (for the green OA route) that give authors more generous rights to distribute on a personal website than on an institutional repository.

LisPi Aug 16, 2023

@only_ohm @ncweaver @cfiesler You know, this makes me think that iframes are the right tool for this.

Alex McLean Aug 16, 2023

@cfiesler I think this is the wrong approach really - academics should just publish gold/diamond open access in the first place. Increasingly funders mandate it, and it's better for everyone. Personal websites go down and can be hard to find, preprint servers generally have terrible metadata. making papers available long term is the actual job of the publishers (sometimes their only job!). If they're not fulfilling that basic job, why not publish elsewhere?

Amber Griffiths HAS MOVED!Aug 16, 2023

@yaxu @cfiesler platinum OA ftw then nobody can even moan about APCs. But yeah, separating the concepts of accessibility and discoverability is kind of critical, personal websites etc are shite for discoverability as you say, and without discoverability accessibility is essentially pointless

Dr. Casey Fiesler Aug 16, 2023

@yaxu ACM charges for open access right now, and it’s not reasonable to suggest get CS academics should not publish there. But ACM allows you to post the final paper on your own website.

Alex McLean Aug 16, 2023

@cfiesler I think it's a reasonable suggestion. It's a ridiculous state of affairs that ACM conferences are so expensive while making it so difficult to read the papers. It's up to researchers to organise and change this.

Dr. Casey Fiesler Aug 16, 2023

@yaxu ACM has stated that they will be entirely open access by 2025.

But also I appreciate their copyright terms; it's way more reasonable than most journals. It's unusual to be explicitly allowed to post papers elsewhere.

And I don't really want to argue about how reasonable it is to expect junior academics to take a principled stand and not publish at the venues expected of them to get tenure in the meantime, but that's my position.

Alex McLean Aug 17, 2023

@cfiesler Ah that's good! and yes this is an issue that should be solved collectively rather than by blaming individuals.

Omar Antolín Aug 17, 2023

@yaxu @cfiesler Tons of researchers can't afford the fees many journals charge for those levels of open access. I'm probably considered a member of the Global South despite being geographically in North America –the answer to this ridddle is Mexico– and I'm not allowed to use departamental funding to pay for journals fees (this differs by department at my university: I'm in math where if you don't want open access you can always publish for free; I know that's harder to do in other fields, and I know for example that biologists at my university can pay for journals fees using university money). I might possibly use grant money for this, but I don't have a lot of that either and feel it's *much* better spent on my postdocs and graduate students. In my subfield of math (and adjacent ones) most papers of the last 10 years are on arXiv.org anyway. The only time I've ever been a coauthor of a paper we had to pay to get published it was with a European coauthor with a fancy EU grant that demanded open access but also allowed to use the grant's funds to pay for it. Even then, I think my coauthor only had enough money left over because the pandemic forced him to cancel many travel plans. 🙂

Alex McLean Aug 17, 2023

@oantolin @cfiesler Yes computing and maths seem quite far behind other fields in sorting this massively wasteful situation out.
FWIW I think a lot of publishers will waive open access fees for researchers in Mexico.

Dr Richard Gomer Aug 16, 2023

@cfiesler UK research councils insist on open-access now, and most institutions have institutional repositories of research outputs where the version of record is not itself made OA. Not perfect, but still pretty great. As a result, most publishers now have to deal with that requirement, so have processes and licenses to accommodate it. EU horizon funding has similar requirements. So hopefully authors having to update their websites will be a thing of the past one day!

AMS Aug 16, 2023

@cfiesler Also there's more than a few authors out there now who will not cite paywall-only papers.

Bharath M. Palavalli Aug 16, 2023

@cfiesler can’t agree more with this! Aside from the time it takes to access much papers, if we don’t have institutional access, it is prohibitively expensive. That being said, the rise of platforms like https://osf.io/ and https://zenodo.org/ is helping with #openaccess and #openresearch. It is hilarious that research publishing models are evolving so slowly in the age of #scihub and #libgen

OSF

Sarah Fackrell Aug 16, 2023

@cfiesler This is one reason why I'm so good that law reviews are (generally) open access.

Dr. Casey Fiesler Aug 16, 2023

@design_law just as hard to find though. google scholar always links to hein online. I end up having to google the title anyway, and often SSRN will come up but law review websites almost never do.

Sarah Fackrell Aug 16, 2023

@cfiesler Oh, interesting

Sam McClatchie Aug 16, 2023

Also please make your email findable. Some journals are now not including emails in the author list and it's a pain to have to search for someones email if it is not readily findable.

herverivano Aug 16, 2023

@cfiesler in case you’re not aware of that, in France we (in public universities and research institutions) are required to publish all our work on the https://hal.science archive. In most case we can put a modified version of the final version of papers as the copyright laws only give to the publisher the layout of the paper and not the content. It’s only the French production but I think it’s a very good national rule that has been taken (one of the few ;-) )

Home - Archive ouverte HAL

@cfiesler I had to write two papers for college and had a difficult time trying to get sources for either of them. Every single paper was locked behind paywalls. I'm a student, I'm not made of money.

Dr. Casey Fiesler Aug 17, 2023

@lowresgamr This probably won’t help you now :( but while you’re in college you should never pay for papers! School librarians can get anything for you.

@cfiesler when using the school internet connection, we were supposed to be able to access academic papers, not all of them, many still didn't recognize the school

Dr. Casey Fiesler Aug 17, 2023

@lowresgamr Librarians can get papers for you through inter library loan even if that library doesn’t have access to them!

@cfiesler Or rather: Everybody publish #OpenAccess 🔓!

I haven't come across an #OpenAccess paper yet that required more than one-two clicks after the DOI to get the PDF. For sure no login. But maybe that's just in my field of research (#meteorology).

Gjalt-Jorn Peters Aug 17, 2023

@cfiesler maybe not everybody knows about https://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ and researchers are afraid of publishers? Which, given publishers' track records, it's understandable I guess 😕

Welcome to Sherpa Romeo - Sherpa Services

Veronika Cheplygina Aug 17, 2023

@cfiesler I emailed some authors (of papers published last year) recently for a PDF because I couldn't find any version, no response. Ok, you are not getting cited I guess 🙃

Tomi the Slav and 1024 others Aug 17, 2023

@cfiesler I used to put everything on ResearchGate. It was the easiest solution.