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Japan's push to make all research open access

low_tech_love
46 replies
12h7m

The term “open access” is misleading and carefully engineered to generate good will, when in fact it should be termed “pay to publish” (as argued quite nicely by Brian McGill [1]). As it stands today, OA is mostly a public money sink, a big scheme to drain public money from European countries. Not only are we paying a ridiculous, ungodly amount of money for people to host PDFs on a website, but the entire idea of publishers competing for the quality of their research output (in order to get submissions) has also basically been eradicated and turned meaningless. Reviewers are pushed to accept papers instead of rejecting them, because a rejected paper makes no money, and now we are left with a deluge of noise that passes for scientific literature. I sincerely pity the PhD student who needs to run a serious, systematic literature review in 2024. Hell sounds more attractive.

If you want open access, ditch the publishers and fund volunteer expert communities to edit and publish their own papers. You can’t have the cake and eat it too.

[1] https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2024/04/29/the-state-of...

tmalsburg2
18 replies
11h29m

Japan's initiative is focused on "green open access" which is different from pay-to-publish. I recommend the section titled "Green OA" in the submitted article. Relevant quote:

"Japan’s move to greater access to its research is focusing on 'green OA' — in which authors make the author-accepted, but unfinalized, versions of papers available in the digital repositories, says Seiichi.

Seiichi says that gold OA — in which the final copyedited and polished version of a paper is made freely available on the journal site — is not feasible on a wide scale. That’s because the cost to make every paper free to read would be too high for universities."

cherryteastain
8 replies
9h24m

in which authors make the author-accepted, but unfinalized, versions of papers available in the digital repositories

This is already the case, almost wveryone puts the preprints on arxiv/SSRN

mcbuilder
7 replies
7h1m

That's true for most recent AI/ML work, but hardly true for all of research.

cherryteastain
5 replies
6h36m

I think it applies to most STEM fields. I'm a reviewer for several journals in a STEM field (not AI/ML specifically, but some manuscripts do try to apply AI/ML to this field) and the vast majority of authors seem to upload their preprints to arxiv etc.

Social sciences may be behind though as you say, I do not know as I'm not in that field.

alephnerd
1 replies
5h25m

I think it applies to most STEM fields

Much of the medical and life sciences space does not publish on Arxiv or OA platforms.

It's slowly changing with Green OA initiatives being pushed by government donors, but not there yet.

Social sciences may be behind though as you say

Econ, a lot of PoliSci, Finance/Business, and Computational Linguistics was very early on the OA/Working Paper movement.

cherryteastain
0 replies
5h7m

Isn't biorxiv quite popular?

whimsicalism
0 replies
2h5m

Not true at all for bio and medical science in particular. (yes biorxiv exists but it is not most papers)

jfkfif
0 replies
6h4m

Econ has a big working paper culture

ants_everywhere
0 replies
5h52m

As someone with graduate degrees in both STEM (math) and social science (psychology) fields, it's true that social science is way behind STEM in terms of preprints to digital archives. It's possible there's momentum here in the last 5 or so years that I'm unaware of though.

That matters for a few reasons:

(1) the average person more frequently encounters psychological, social and medical issues more than they do math problems. And since the research in those fields tends to be pay walled, people are at the mercy of things like SEO spam medical and health sites.

(2) wrong ideas in medicine or psychology can (and have in the past) damaged entire generations of people. So in that sense their blast radius can be very large. This means that peer review is especially important and that there's a potential negative externality to posting preprints and drafts before they're finalized. I suspect we'd have to solve the peer review and quality problem before STEM-style preprint archives become the norms in all fields.

insane_dreamer
0 replies
4h58m

It’s also true for biological research (bioxriv)

low_tech_love
6 replies
11h15m

Green OA is just as meaningless as—-or worse than—-Gold OA. You pay the publisher a large sum of money for the “right” to self-publish the preprint, and they still paywall it. The vast majority of people will find the paywalled version before yours, and anyway there is no guarantee that your preprint is accurate with the final, published version, so most people will still trust the paywalled version more than your PDF. Especially when performing systematic literature reviews where you need to document the sources of your references.

The current implementation of OA (any of them) is basically a self-fulfilling prophecy: we convinced ourselves that “publishers are evil” and impossible to get rid of, and now we are paying them so that they don’t have to do their job. We basically retired publishers early with an extra pension, all because everyone “wants to believe” in open access. But guess what? This is not disruptive. OA is just as “capitalist evil” as the usual publishing, or even more so. Do you want to be disruptive? The disrupt. Get rid of the publishers. Or at least constrain funding only to not-for-profits for example.

shellac
2 replies
10h12m

You pay the publisher a large sum of money for the “right” to self-publish the preprint, and they still paywall it

There's no APC with Green OA, so what money are you talking about? Green OA is regular publishing, but with self archiving. There will be a version freely available, and the publishers aren't paid for that privilege.

If you want a route to the death of publishers, green OA is a promising one.

(I think the headline ought to emphasise that this is pushing green OA, which is the interesting bit)

low_tech_love
1 replies
4h47m

I’ve had to pay for the option to publish my preprints in a couple of CS journals. I’ll look into that.

shellac
0 replies
3h50m

Ah, I somewhat see the confusion. Green OA doesn't require the publisher to publish other versions for free, it just means you are allowed to publish them. Typically you'd publish them via an institutional repository, preprint server (often discipline specific), or in one of a number of free online services.

kome
1 replies
8h35m

"Green OA is just as meaningless as—-or worse than—-Gold OA. You pay the publisher a large sum of money for the “right” to self-publish the preprint"

that's not how it works. you don't pay anything.

low_tech_love
0 replies
4h44m

That’s not what I experienced in the past, at least not with IEEE (I stopped caring after a while).

radford-neal
0 replies
5h4m

"there is no guarantee that your preprint is accurate with the final, published version, so most people will still trust the paywalled version more than your PDF"

I think this is backwards. The definitive version that should be cited is the freely-available one, since that is the version that everyone can read. No one should cite the paywalled version.

consp
1 replies
8h25m

That’s because the cost to make every paper free to read would be too high for universities.

That's just bs. They can make a law fixing that for free but won't. It's not can, but will which is the problem.

low_tech_love
0 replies
4h21m

The truth is that OA is a childish illusion that got “absorbed” by the adults in the room who tapped the kids on their back and said “no worries, we’ll take it from here”. Then they turned traditional publishing, which was already an elaborate expensive ruse, into OA which is an even more expensive (but less elaborate) ruse. Now everyone is happy, except someone trying to do actual research and having to read 1000 meaningless papers a day.

9dev
2 replies
11h8m

You got to love India’s ability to pick the most indiscoverable domain names possible for their projects...

datpiff
1 replies
8h39m

It's almost as if they're speaking a different language

carlob
0 replies
8h26m

or 22

xvilka
0 replies
7h42m

It would be nice to make a simple website that will list those repositories in easily discoverable way per country. Something akin to "Awesome Research" list.

impendia
3 replies
5h29m

I am a mathematics researcher. I agree with most of what you say, but

Reviewers are pushed to accept papers instead of rejecting them, because a rejected paper makes no money

The only pressure I ever get is from editors (i.e., other mathematicians, who make all the final decisions), if I'm taking too long and they want me to hurry up.

If a representative of the publisher attempted to pressure me for any reason, then my response would be less than polite.

Occasionally I have gotten review requests from "pay to publish" journals which will publish pretty much anything, and which don't have any credibility within the math community. These, I simply delete as spam.

rscho
0 replies
5h23m

Just occasionally? I get at least 3-4 of those daily! They've become seriously annoying, and confused senior professors around me often fall into the trap.

low_tech_love
0 replies
4h49m

I reject the invitations too, but the fact is that they exist, there are (many) people who do them, the papers are published, they come up in searches, and the whole thing becomes a muddy mess.

Most people say “we’ll just don’t read/cite them” but the fact is that there is no clear red line; it’s all foggy. In order to look at a paper and say “I will not read you because you are crap” you need to spend some time with it, and if you have 2000 of them, that translates to a lot of wasted time. The reason why journals are supposed to do serious peer review was exactly so that we don’t have to do it ourselves.

abdullahkhalids
0 replies
6m

It's possible for pressure to exist at a higher level. The editor simply stops asking reviews from people who reject papers above some threshold rate. Or at even a higher level, the journal replaces the editor who maintains a too low an acceptance rate.

These pressures are harder to notice, without population level data.

DiogenesKynikos
2 replies
7h41m

Reviewers are pushed to accept papers instead of rejecting them, because a rejected paper makes no money

Prestigious journals have very low (single-digit percentage) acceptance rates.

One or two rungs down, the standard domain-specific journals are still rigorous, and you need to do substantial work to get published in them. It's a hurdle that any decent graduate student with a good advisor can pass, but it's not as if you can just write anything and get published.

There are junk journals that will publish anything, but I don't think scientists generally pay much attention to those journals.

I sincerely pity the PhD student who needs to run a serious, systematic literature review in 2024. Hell sounds more attractive.

Doing a literature review is not that difficult. You begin with a few highly cited papers. Then you look at what papers they reference in the intro. You also look at the list of papers that cite them and sort by the number of citations. You can work in both directions and pretty quickly establish what the important papers in the field are.

Notice that the important thing here is to look at citations. Getting a paper into a journal is only the first, most basic step. Peer review is only an initial quality check. Over time, other scientists decide what papers are important and cite them. If a paper racks up 100 citations, that means a lot more than just passing peer review.

rscho
0 replies
5h17m

You are not describing a systematic literature review. Systematic reviews are hell indeed, at least in non-STEM fields.

low_tech_love
0 replies
4h27m

There are junk journals that will publish anything, but I don't think scientists generally pay much attention to those journals.

Yes, but the point is not that the good journals are not there, it’s that the good ones are drowned out by the absolute humongous amount of garbage that comes out every day. If you do research you know that it’s not so simple like “oh I only read papers from journals X and Y”. Good research comes out everywhere, and if you don’t cite it people (I mean reviewers, if you can call them that) will complain, and anyway you’ll be putting yourself in a bubble which is bad practice. It used to be that journals would do the work for you to separate good from bad research, but nowadays it’s on the researcher to dig through 1000 papers to find a single good one. It’s ridiculous and meaningless. If we’re paying them and making them rich, at least I’d expect them to do their job.

tokai
1 replies
10h15m

McGill and you got it backwards. Open Access has a quite clear definition.[0] Publishers have co-opeded the term and dopne everything to confuse the issue. All the so-called open access colours are mainly publisher made, to water down the true OA definition.

[0] https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read/

low_tech_love
0 replies
4h34m

Sure, but none of that matters if the big publishers are the ones gobbling up the money anyway. For some reason it’s better to pay them a ridiculous amount of money to host PDFs than it is to pay for subscriptions? What’s the difference? Most university libraries have always had access to all the important journals and anyone can go there and do their research. The whole idea that subscription is evil and OA is good is ludicrous. We’re paying the same amount of money (or more) only to get a much, much shittier service, and a torrent of absolute meaningless “research” that only serves to drown out the good ones.

PS: And by the way, if you say that “not every country has access to these libraries” then think about whether they have money to pay for APCs.

norswap
1 replies
4h31m

In CS, it's widely accepted that you can publish your "drafts" publicly. Basically just the real deal without the notices of publication (I guess maybe legally you have to leave some differences in? I never bothered, and I doubt the publishers who everyone kinda hates would dare creating this kind of controversy).

As others have pointed out, some countries mandate national or institutional repositories.

A good grassroots way out of this is educating researchers to always take one of these options. Let publishers overplay their hand and get crushed.

Of course, it would be nicer if regulators realized how ridiculous this all is and crushed them without the need for public outcry, but one may dream.

contrarian1234
0 replies
3h46m

When I published with an Elsevier journal they explained the "draft" thing pretty clearly. They said you retain copyright on whatever you write yourself. But once you have reviewer feedback and incorporate feedback from the journal editor(s) then it's no longer entirely your work and you couldn't distribute it at your own will. You could pay the journal a huge amount of money (in effect for the work done by the editors), and then the paper would be open access. The fees might not be reasonable (it's kind of hard to judge) but the overall logic made sense to me

So the first draft before review - the one you wrote all on your own - is what you can put up online. I'm not in CS but I assume the logic is similar in other fields.

They also provided a separate link of the final published PDF that you could use to distribute the paper to colleagues and interested parties. This link worked for a sufficiently long period of X amount of days/months. After that it was paywalled and in their garden

mfld
1 replies
6h48m

I don't get it. Ditching publishers to fund expert communities? Shouldn't there be some form of organisation that connects those experts, selects some as journal editors, provides infrastructure for submission/review/paper access, etc? If yes, wouldn't "publisher" be suitable term for such an organisation?

There exist publishers that, instead of being part of big media outlets, a run by research organizations themselves (e.g. EMBO press). I agree that it would be nice if more would be published there.

low_tech_love
0 replies
4h40m

I mean in the same way communities organize conferences regularly without becoming publishers. Anyway if you want to call them publishers fine, as long as they are not giant behemoths who feed on large amounts of public money to do nothing.

At least when publishing was an actual market (instead of being just a money sink) the publishers had to actually do their job to survive.

davidparks21
1 replies
1h35m

I struggle with this question. The editor plays a valuable role and it's not hard to swallow the argument that editors make science better, they're the front line filter. Employing them full time is a core value that the current system provides. I'm wary (but not close minded) to the idea that volunteer orgs could scale to the top echelons of scientific publication, which require a lot of filtering. Perhaps if we look to the conference paper model where funding primarily comes from the conference? The conference brings benefits beyond publishing. In that model publishing equates to financial discount or free entrance to the conference, so it flips the equation.

eslaught
0 replies
1h22m

I work in CS and we do (mostly) conference publishing.

I could be wrong, but I don't think PC chairs are paid, by anybody. Maybe they get free housing at the conference, but this is more of a consolation prize given the amount of work involved.

Certainly the rank and file PC members don't get anything. I was on one PC mailing list where one of the organizers accidentally let slip that (some) organizers get free housing, and there was a big uproar in the PC. None of us get anything like that.

So this is literally a system where the expert reviewers get nothing, and even the chairs in charge do it nearly for free. What part of this needs to cost money?

The peer review comes from the community. The exclusivity and filter comes from the community. Even the funding comes from the community, because community members pay to go to the conference.

What the publisher does is, as GP noted, mainly to host PDFs on a website and make sure they stay up. That costs something, but nothing like what the licensing fees for these services are (or the so-called "open access" fees that we now pay).

sharpshadow
0 replies
8h50m

It's a shame that the public has to pay twice. Tax money pays it in the first place and then we have to pay for it again..

pessimizer
0 replies
2h26m

OA is mostly a public money sink, a big scheme to drain public money from European countries. Not only are we paying a ridiculous, ungodly amount of money for people to host PDFs on a website

This is a choice that European countries are making that has nothing to do with open access. You can always choose to overpay well-connected insider contractors to accomplish any of the functions of government.

gbnvc
0 replies
2h44m

No, you can invent this idea that open access is a boogeyman, but it’s flat out corporate lies. This is free speech. I’m allowed to say I think a statement is untrustworthy.

barfbagginus
0 replies
49m

Gold OA is trash, don't confuse it with true OA modes:

1. Green OA: peer reviewed and free for reader and author; author waives copyright

2. Diamond OA: peer reviewed and free for reader and author; author KEEPS copyright

3. Black OA: free for readers, pirated by hackers; DISREGARDS copyright

See my other note where I argue that BOA is the most important one, since it does not depend on state funding or publisher largesse. It simply seizes the knowledge that must be seized.

barfbagginus
0 replies
57m

Don't forget the most important OA mode

Black OA means hacking journals and making their papers free for all.

That's the only OA we need to invest in. Make the BOA ratio into a perfect 1.0, and all other problems with OA vanish.

WarOnPrivacy
0 replies
11h49m

Headline: Japan's push to make all research open access

The term "open access" is misleading and carefully engineered to generate good will, when in fact it should be termed "pay to publish". [1]

[1] Seems to be about how OA is done in countries that aren't Japan.

koolala
8 replies
15h53m

Internet Noodles of Babel! Let's have every corporation do this too! We can solve every problem that matters by working together like this, the rest is just corpo-gaming.

TaylorAlexander
7 replies
14h49m

Absolutely! I think the concept of proprietary knowledge for profit was actually a huge mistake, and that humanity can advance much faster and more effectively through open collaboration. This applies to patents too (and arguably copyright).

jrhey
6 replies
12h56m

There is no advancement without profit. Advances are a product of market competition. When no company can profit from investing in R&D, there will be no R&D.

immibis
2 replies
6h50m

The government invented the internet.

waihtis
1 replies
4h30m

with money that came from ......?

immibis
0 replies
2h15m

Nonsensical question. You invent things with brainpower, not money.

__loam
1 replies
12h41m

What a sad view of things.

koolala
0 replies
12h37m

Hi, I feel more advanced getting to talk with you so I am grateful for that, didn't cost us anything :)

anigbrowl
0 replies
12h26m

Pfffffft

gigatexal
4 replies
12h51m

I support this 100%. All publicly funded research even in the least bit should be public. Shwartz would be proud.

surfingdino
3 replies
10h59m

Playing the Devil's advocate for a sec, I'd ask the public if it is prepared to fund hosting on those publications in perpetuity? And to answer my own question, I think we should demand that scientific papers are made available for free by publicly-funded scientific libraries.

whimsicalism
0 replies
2h2m

I'd ask the public if it is prepared to fund hosting on those publications in perpetuity

are we pretending pdf hosting is actually costly or what? the devil should hire better advocates

jfkfif
0 replies
6h1m

osti.gov

gigatexal
0 replies
9h19m

The library of Congress could host it. Hell I’d ask for my taxes to be raised if needed to host these publications for everyone.

a_bonobo
4 replies
13h11m

Australia already has a similar system: if the research is funded by a national funder, then the pre-publisher version has to be deposited at the institute's research repository (basically the Word/PDF file you sent to the publisher, before they add their copyrighted formatting).

I'd judge the success so/so: it's barely enforced, librarians will remind you if you didn't upload one paper, but it's not like there's any consequences. It's also about the text of the paper, not about the associated data. And these repositories are generally built by for-profit providers and aren't exactly open: I know for a fact that my Google Scholar profile does not link to the institute's repository, papers in there are barely findable.

it also doesn't change how researchers are evaluated, so the eternal rat-race to get into Nature/Science etc. continues, with all the associated problems.

We've had this system for years now and it feels like it barely made a blip.

Seiichi says that gold OA — in which the final copyedited and polished version of a paper is made freely available on the journal site — is not feasible on a wide scale. That’s because the cost to make every paper free to read would be too high for universities.

One should note that this isn't too expensive because of associated costs: it's that the for-profit publishers keep ratcheting up the cost. Nature-group journals now take more than ten grand in OA fees per paper, which is not justified by any associated cost. They're typesetting a PDF and hosting it for ten grand a PDF.

kergonath
1 replies
12h27m

Australia already has a similar system: if the research is funded by a national funder, then the pre-publisher version has to be deposited at the institute's research repository (basically the Word/PDF file you sent to the publisher, before they add their copyrighted formatting).

It’s more or less the same in the UK and France as well.

I'd judge the success so/so: it's barely enforced, librarians will remind you if you didn't upload one paper, but it's not like there's any consequences.

IIRC in the UK it does not count in the national performance assessment it if is not in an open repository.

It's also about the text of the paper, not about the associated data.

Yeah. Data is a big problem. There are many different types that cannot be handled just like a pdf (tons of files in the same dataset, huge archives and everything in between). It’s a huge lot of storage space, the vast majority of which will never be even accessed, never mind used. I’ve been part of several initiatives and it is not easy to set up.

And these repositories are generally built by for-profit providers and aren't exactly open: I know for a fact that my Google Scholar profile does not link to the institute's repository, papers in there are barely findable.

That’s a damn shame. The British government is doing a lot of things right with their open access policy, but a thing that works quite well in France is that there is a single national repository ( https://hal.science : it voild be better indexed but it does show up on Google Scholar) and everyone uses it. This is the sort of things that makes sense at the national level. A myriad of small repositories on obscure university websites is not very helpful. That way it also does not depend on the (possible lack of) willingness of individual institutions to fund it and do it properly.

it also doesn't change how researchers are evaluated, so the eternal rat-race to get into Nature/Science etc. continues, with all the associated problems.

If we’re really serious about open access, only articles in a public repository should count. All the legal issues there used to be were cleared up, the infrastructure is there (things like arxiv can be used as a last resort for governments or institutions that won’t get their ducks in a row). The issue is really lack of good will.

9dev
0 replies
11h3m

Theoretically, something like a national OPDS feed would be perfect for this: OPDS is a publication distribution feed protocol that allows to include other sub-feeds, making for a distributed tree structure. A country could publish a collection of individual university feeds, which in turn linked to the papers of their researchers.

dguest
1 replies
10h30m

This means that journals can't prevent you from uploading a preprint though. A few publishers do this [1]. Even if the upload isn't enforced it means the restriction can't be either.

But it's odd that the paper must be in the institute's repository and not one of a larger list of preprint servers. I would assume the authors would much rather put a paper on arXiv than on their shoddy university repository.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_publishers_by...

a_bonobo
0 replies
7h20m

Having submitted to biorxiv before many times: oh yeah!!! the ease of submission there is second to none. For-profit publishers' submission process is an overcomplicated pile in comparison.

klysm
3 replies
14h49m

This would be amazing to see in the US. Unfortunately I feel like lobbying is too powerful with the death grip publishers have. If you were to do a popular vote, it would be nearly unanimous I expect.

pkaye
0 replies
13h38m

If you read the article it mentions that US implemented an OA mandate in 2022.

The plan follows in the footsteps of the influential Plan S, introduced six years ago by a group of research funders in the United States and Europe known as cOAlition S, to accelerate the move to OA publishing. The United States also implemented an OA mandate in 2022 that requires all research funded by US taxpayers to be freely available from 2026.
karaterobot
0 replies
14h45m

The United States also implemented an OA mandate in 2022 that requires all research funded by US taxpayers to be freely available from 2026.
jfkfif
0 replies
6h0m

DOE already mandates this

amadeuspagel
3 replies
6h31m

Why can't academics just publish their stuff on a blog like everyone else?

rscho
1 replies
5h5m

Because: poor graduate students would contemplate suicide for having to gather hundreds of papers from just as many obscure blogs.

insane_dreamer
0 replies
4h36m

if authors all just uploaded a copy of their final PDF to sci-hub this would solve the problem

ufo
0 replies
4h34m

Papers should be immutable, blogs bit rot, and anonymous peer review is important.

The million dollar question is why don't researchers publish on journals that don't charge outrageous open-access fees. Here the main problemis that carreer advancement is predicated on publishing in prestigious venues. Such venues take advantage of that by jacking their price. Fixing this will require cooperation from governments, which have leverage on both sides of the equation: they can help fund alternative paper repositories, and they are ultimately responsible for the rating criteria of what venues are prestigious and how research grants get awarded.

tkgally
2 replies
14h33m

Last year, my employer, the University of Tokyo, became the first Japanese university to sign the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) [1]. Like open access, that initiative is a positive move toward a better research environment, and it would be great if more institutions committed to it.

[1] https://sfdora.org/

staunton
1 replies
12h16m

Did this change anything about how research is conducted?

tkgally
0 replies
10h43m

Good question. It's probably too early to tell.

By signing DORA, the university leadership has stated support for a principle about how hiring and promotion decisions should be made. But it may take a few years before that principle is fully absorbed by the faculty committees who actually evaluate candidates.

karaterobot
2 replies
14h45m

it also said that it would invest 10 billion yen (around US$63 million) to standardize institutional repositories — websites dedicated to hosting scientific papers, their underlying data and other materials — ensuring that there will be a mechanism for making research in Japan open.

The important part isn't necessarily the papers, it's getting access to the data. I'll note that the hurdle for open access is not a lack of support from funders or from the government, it's from researchers. Researchers want everybody's else's data, but they don't want to give their data to anybody else, because they want to be the ones to publish on it. It's IP. It can take years to get access to a dataset, because the owners throw every obstacle in your way, and drag their feet as much as possible—it makes cancelling a gym membership look easy. And I am speaking about projects where open access is written into the funding as a requirement.

My point is that I'd be interested to know what data governance processes they're putting in place if all the data is being consolidated into a single system, as the article says it is.

Staple_Diet
0 replies
13h10m

I recall a paper that sought to explore how willing authors were to release data when they had published open access and stated 'data available on request'. Iirc it was below 50% that responded with data. See related here; https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/jbu9r/

That being said, there are also issues with opening the gates to anyone to get your data and use it to publish; https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

My data is OA, but I'd appreciate any one wanting to use to first reach out and discuss any nuances that may influence their analysis.

FredPret
0 replies
12h24m

There should be some academic reward for just gathering quality data

gumbojuice
2 replies
12h41m

I could imagine a problem here in India, where there is no funding for publishing papers, especially for graduate students.

thisisjaymehta
0 replies
12h5m

Exactly, but government is doing its best to boost R&D, what matters more is private funding for R&D. Big companies like Reliance, TATA and Adani should setup research labs in universities and colleges.

2Gkashmiri
0 replies
11h16m

what do you mean?

worthless-trash
0 replies
15h58m

This could be the start of something beautiful.

tmalsburg2
0 replies
11h31m

Smart, because why would you use billions in tax money to fund research then let publisher parasites take the results hostage.

swader999
0 replies
13h26m

Imagine if this was so advantageous that a large portion of the rest of the world got pulled into it. Interesting times.

rondrabkin
0 replies
10h11m

So many problems with the existing process but questions could include -is anyone going to take down bad quality or fake research -is there a way to update published papers (like link rot in references ) -will the repositories be SEO optimized so people will find them

lieblingautor
0 replies
14h1m

Sounds great, hope it will inspire its neighboring countries to take a similar initiative.

jimbobthrowawy
0 replies
5h13m

Nice change! I expect people to still use sci-hub, or something like it, to access these for UX reasons.

EchoReflection
0 replies
3h7m

"Japan plans to make all publicly funded research available to read in institutional repositories. "

Oh, are you not a student or teacher or employee here at the University of XYZ? I'm sorry, this research is not 'freely' available to you.