

Dear Nature - jgrahamc
http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/09/dear-nature.html

======
michael_dorfman
It was (predatory) pricing policies like this that led Knuth and the entire
editorial board of the "Journal of Algorithms" to resign en masse, and start a
new journal with the ACM.

For those interested, the statement from the board can be found at
<http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~hal/s.pdf>, and Knuth's (long, fascinating)
letter to his colleagues can be found at <http://www-cs-
faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf>

~~~
wheels
I consider the ACM just as bad. Their membership pricing is restrictive for
casual users and their conferences are worse.

I also consider their restrictions on who is able to become a member insulting
(though they don't apply to me). Wait, so a physicist who's taken up
programming in the last year isn't supposed to be able to read papers on
computation?

~~~
arebop
RE: restrictions on who is able to become a member:

"Membership Qualifications You must satisfy one of the qualifications below:
1\. Bachelor's Degree (in any subject area); or 2\. Equivalent Level of
Education; or 3\. Two years full-time employment in the IT field." ---
[https://campus.acm.org/public/ProfQJ/qjprof_control.cfm?form...](https://campus.acm.org/public/ProfQJ/qjprof_control.cfm?form_type=Professional)

~~~
jgrahamc
Sorry, Michael Faraday you don't have the relevant experience or degree so you
can't have access to that information.

Huh? You mean you attended _free_ lectures by Sir Humphrey Davy and then went
on to become one of the greatest scientists of all time.

Wow. Those were the days.

------
robg
Furthermore, where else do content creators pay for the privilege of
publishing their work (over $1000 usually per paper), then have those
outrageous rates for visitors to access that work?

~~~
rglovejoy
And even furthermore, most of the research being reported in these journals
was paid for with taxpayer money.

~~~
dcurtis
Most? Really? Government grants don't fund more than _half_ of scientific
research, do they?

~~~
robg
The budgets in 2008:

NIH = $28B

NSF = $6B

That's $34B. While surely there's alot of private R&D (and more government),
it's rare that I see a paper from industry, but then my field is biased
against it. And there are private foundations. Does enough published research
come from those private sources to outweigh publically funded studies? I
wouldn't bet on it. Remember, there's a perpetual cycle in most public funding
with publications. In order to get funded, you have to show a record of
publishing. The priorities of private research would seem to be a very
different threshold.

Still, it's a solid point. You've paid for our research. Why should you have
to pay to access our reports?

To be fair though, I have yet to hear about complaints from journals regarding
researchers who post their reports on their public websites. But that makes it
hard to find things. Journals would surely squawk if there were alternative
repositories.

~~~
hugh
Don't forget the Department of Energy and the various military funding
agencies -- they fund an awful lot of external research as well (in addition
to any unpublished stuff they might be doing internally). I'm sure the
Department of Agriculture etc are also handing out plenty of grants in the
relevant fields as well.

~~~
robg
Sure - that's what I meant by "more government". Problem is, I don't think you
can simply look at their budgets - they do other things besides research - and
their research efforts are likely much smaller. It would be interesting to see
the research grant lines in their budgets if anyone knows or finds them.

------
jgrahamc
I should have added that this sort of thing is why PLoS is so important.

<http://plos.org/>

~~~
mechanical_fish
I seriously believe that _this_ \-- the fact that you need access to a
university library, a research grant, or several thousand dollars worth of
discretionary income just to _read_ the primary source materials of the last
70 years of science -- is the reason why so much of the planet is
scientifically illiterate.

We ask why the hilarious notion that science is just a species of religion --
a collection of essentially arbitrary dogmas handed down by priests in white
coats -- has taken such hold among the populace. But, really, what does the
public see of modern science but dogma? The state of the art -- the debate,
the argument, the statistical calculations, the brilliant conclusions, the
idiotic conclusions, even the raw data itself -- is all locked up behind
paywalls and private conferences and university tuitions. 99.5% of the world
never sees actual science being done. At best, they do toy science in their
classrooms and read prepackaged science-flavored PR in their magazines.

The best the public can hope for is a bunch of documentaries and
popularizations, some of which are great. But nearly all of them are second-
hand, many of them contain major omissions, mistakes, or distortions, and they
feel constrained by their need to maintain their mass audience of
businesspeople on planes -- they tend to not publish graphs or, god help us,
equations.

Of course, most of the public wouldn't understand _Nature_ even if it became
free and open tomorrow. Many of the papers are written in barely-
comprehensible jargon. But that's not a coincidence; it's a side effect of
allowing journals to evolve into niche publications for a handful of graduate
students. Perhaps, in the world where scientific publications are available to
anyone to read, journals will slowly evolve toward a standard of writing that
allows interested fans to follow along. Or a genre of annotated journal
articles might arise.

~~~
DaniFong
Alternatively, people will just start publishing online, on blogs or wikis or
something else. It's already starting to happen; math is leading the way. Much
of my website is somewhere in the space between 'blog entry' and 'paper'.

~~~
jgrahamc
Yes. One way around this whole 'who pays' mess would be a Wikipedia like site
for papers. Anyone can publish, anyone can review. If you added voting to that
and some level of authentication of users it could be very interesting.

------
aswanson
Mr. Graham-Cummings,

Amen. Kindly forward a similar letter to the IEEE and ACM.

Regards,

aswanson

