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Nature makes all articles free to view
- yupthatsit 12y agoI paid for the research with my tax payer money. Give me full access to the articles. Anything less is unacceptable (unless Nature wants to pay me back the taxes they owe me).
- paulrosenzweig 12y agoThere might be details I'm missing, but I think all NIH funded, peer-reviewed research needs to be publicly accessible within 12 months of publication. http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm
- toomuchtodo 12y agoAny Gates Foundation research is now required to be immediately available at publication as well: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/how-we-work/general-information/open-access-policy http://www.gatesfoundation.org/how-we-work/general-informati...
- timthorn 12y agoSounds like your beef is with the researchers or their teams for choosing a paid access publication, not Nature then.
- timtadh 12y agoNot all research is funded by tax payers.
- baddox 12y agoSounds like Libertarian propaganda. /s
- jaskerr 12y agoBe prepared to name research projects that do not receive government funding in the first or second degree. (That is: receive funding directly, or from grant-making organizations that themselves receive substantial government funding.)
- refurb 12y agoAny research funded by non-governmental organizations like the Howard Hughes Foundation, Michael J Fox foundation, etc, etc.
- yzzxy 12y agoAccording to the way stem cell research was segregated, those projects would have had to take place in buildings funded without taxes, staffed by researchers paid by private funds, using new equipment and materials, etc...
- tjradcliffe 12y agoA great deal of research funded by such organizations is done in combination with taxpayer funding, particularly with regard to infrastructure. As a cancer researcher I had funding from companies and foundations, but depended on my position in a tax-payer funded research lab to actually do the work.
- sjf 12y agoYour taxes are not funding international research.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- mkramlich 12y ago> I paid for the research with my tax payer money. Give me full access to it. though I have a similar desire I don't think that's a good argument for justifying it. why? evaluate the following symmetrical situations: > I paid for the [tank, aircraft carrier, nukes, Fort Knox, etc] with my tax payer money. Therefore... that said, I do think there's a greater net benefit to humanity, and scientific progress will accelerate, the easier, cheaper and less restrictive access we have to papers and research results.
- 542458 12y ago> I paid for the [tank, aircraft carrier, nukes, Fort Knox, etc] with my tax payer money. Therefore... That's not a very good comparison, as those are all rival goods, and furthermore have obvious negative externalities (IE are dangerous). I can't think of a non-rival government-funded good (without harmful externalities) that would NOT make sense to to make freely available. Edit: Oh hey, I'm being downvoted for an opinion. Sitting at -1 right now.
- eru 12y agoDon't worry about early downvotes. (Also, don't complain about downvotes. That only makes the signal to noise ratio worse.)
- Houshalter 12y agoDon't complain about complaining about downvotes.
- eru 12y agoOh, I meant to educate about the culture, not complain.
- alexqgb 12y agoNot sure why you're being down-voted. The comparison you were pointing out as being obviously idiotic is, in fact, obviously idiotic. There's a far better comparison to be made with IP produced by NASA, for instance, which is automatically released directly to the public domain on the grounds that the American public is who commissioned it in the first place (for the rest of the world, it's a gift - you're welcome).
- thinkling 12y agoKey quote: "All research papers from Nature will be made free to read in a proprietary screen-view format that can be annotated but not copied, printed or downloaded." It sounds like: * you may have to install the ReadCube reader to view the protected PDFs, unclear if you can view them in a regular PDF viewer. ("ReadCube (...) will be used to host and display read-only versions of the articles' PDFs") * only subscribers can initiate access sharing of specific articles, going back only to 1997 for individual subscribers. It sounds like the general public will not be able to search for articles and view them through the Nature website. Well, it's a step forward.
- cfitz 12y agoI just checked this out, you do not have to install anything. From their website: "ReadCube Connect is an HTML5-powered interactive PDF viewer." I presume this update will please many people, because they can now see whether or not an article they're contemplating purchasing actually touches on desired areas or not. Good thinking on their part!
- silencio 12y agoI just signed up for ReadCube, thinking this meant I could at least browse articles as a member of the general public. You have to install an app on your computer and log in to view articles and use it. ReadCube Connect seems to be a Scribd-esque way to embed articles on existing pages (like a news story), not a standalone app. You also need a link shared to you via a paid subscriber (or one of a bunch of news sites etc.) to view articles. It's "free" in a very misleading way.
- silencio 12y agoD'oh, can't edit to add a new observation: now that there are links shared in the comments here, it appears the webapp is in fact a thing and you're not required to install anything or log in to view the "enhanced" PDFs. But you need the webapp or the standalone app to view them. Still requires those links in the first place though. I just get prompted to buy access if I use any of the pubmed/google scholar search functionality in the app. Blergh.
- iandanforth 12y agoI like the idea of shared annotations. Or more specifically I like the idea of Science as a conversation. It has always frustrated me that papers are formatted for print and don't include hyperlinks, and it's difficult to add comments or corrections to a paper. Like others though I am not sure I believe that publishers should continue to exist in anything like their current form.
- Cogito 12y agoI would really enjoy an annotation system like genius.com How that might work in a scholarly setting I'm not sure. The melting pot of commentary and feedback that can surround a paper is something that individual reviews will always struggle to capture, but is easily achieved with an annotated copy. Whilst background and detailed investigation may be left out of sections of a paper, or are assumed knowledge for the target audience, annotations allow casual readers to engage with the content and the author beyond what is appropriate in the published form. It would be interesting to see genius.com introduce a science section, or perhaps just more science sections (they have law, history, literature etc already), but the format doesn't immediately gel with how papers are currently published. A pdf annotation system might be the best bet for now.
- Nicholas_C 12y agoOff topic: Why is this article dated December 2nd? It is still December 1st everywhere in the United States. Perhaps it was published after normal business hours on the 1st, thus defaulting to the 2nd as the official date? Just curious.
- michael_storm 12y agoMaybe their servers use UTC.
- greenburger 12y agoNature Publishing Group is based in London
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- ben1040 12y agoNature is published from London, the article was probably embargoed for publication on December 2 at midnight local time.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- thejosh 12y agoBecause maybe the internet is global and not every site on the internet is US time?
- Nicholas_C 12y agoI assumed Nature is a US publication. Oops.
- mkonecny 12y agoThe internet doesn't exist solely in the US. It spans GMT -5 through GMT -8. There are countries that are up to 16 hours ahead in time..
- JohnHammersley 12y agoStill a long way to go, but this is a huge step forward. It's also not the first time Macmillan have tried something new - their whole Digital Science arm (which includes ReadCube) is focused on innovation and disruptive publishing tech: http://www.digital-science.com/ http://www.digital-science.com/
- morninj 12y agoTheir definition of "free" is interesting. Only paid subscribers can search for articles, and apparently others can view articles only if subscribers share links with them. For many purposes, articles might be "free" but still hidden from the public.
- stephentmcm 12y agoSo how long until someone writes a web crawler that dumps all the links into a searchable public db?
- qq66 12y agoThe public link is probably coded to each subscriber, so they would be able to identify the culprit and disable all the links from that subscriber.
- selmnoo 12y agoHah, come on. :) That's not a very high barrier. A 'pirate' simply has to get a throwaway account (or steal one, if he's truly bad) and he doesn't even have to worry about that. I expect all Nature articles made "free" today to be available on TPB in one month. I'll put .1 BTC on it. :)
- eru 12y agoWhat odds?
- morninj 12y agoAs soon as a link is shared, each person who learns the URL is potentially a "culprit."
- jpatokal 12y agoNot if the URL encodes the originator of the link, and all links tied to that user stop working when Nature flips a switch. But regardless of what DRM scheme they choose, it's doomed to fail, all it takes is one person to crack the scheme and liberate the underlying documents. Alternatively, since 100 anointed blogs and media outlets will apparently have the right to download raw PDFs, all it takes is for one of their accounts to get hacked.
- kruk 12y agoI would love to get my hands on some of the articles from 1869. Hopefully someone will share a few of these articles publicly.
- geographomics 12y agoThey're available here (as well as all the articles that are still copyrighted): http://libgen.org/scimag/?journalid=nature&v=1869&s= http://libgen.org/scimag/?journalid=nature&v=1869&s=
- morninj 12y agofree to read in a proprietary screen-view format Free, under our control.
- jmount 12y agoIncorrect title. "Nature places all article in flakey peephole viewer."
- boie0025 12y agoMy thoughts exactly. I was incredibly excited until I read the first line or so. One day perhaps.
- krick 12y ago"One day" will come when free and open-for-everyone platforms will occupy that domain, not when "Nature" or some other sly organization will do that. Like archive.org, but with peer review by people who use it. I'm sure that in principle it is possible. I mean, if you are interested in some domain you surely know few people who's opinion you'd trust. They might not even be Ph.Ds, but they somehow got this good reputation, probably not by accident. So if somebody like this presses "Like" button under some article and leaves comment about what is trustworthy here and what isn't, it probably will be as good (better, actually) for you, as opinion of Nature's staff. And as these people by definition are interested in this domain as well, chances are they also will be interested to read this article and thus will be able to press "Like" button and leave a comment. So, yeah, in principle it it possible, but I imagine it is really hard to do it right. Because essentially it is the same as any "karma" or "rating" system on some forum, and inventing proper rating system is really hard — it's not the most knowledgeable people who usually have the highest rank on any thematic forum. But on forums and other existing social platforms it works, because rating isn't that important. And in our case it's all about rating and trust.
- p4bl0 12y ago"Nature allows paid subscribers to place any article in a flakey peephole viewer which usage is reserved to the ones who registered an account with Nature and agree to use some DRM-filled proprietary software". FTFY :-/.
- kappaloris 12y agoSchools should really start teaching the concept of Turing completeness to kids, otherwise we'll get to the heat death of the universe with non technical people still thinking that this kind of crap is an acceptable solution.
- georgemcbay 12y agoFor half a second after I clicked through to ReadCube's site I thought it must be associated with Google because their website's design is the Googleist thing I've ever seen not actually associated with Google. https://www.readcube.com/ https://www.readcube.com/
- lotyrin 12y agoThe typography and layout, colors all seem pretty generic or even slightly unlike google, but I agree. It must just be the Open Sans. I didn't realize how much I had it associated with Google's usage.
- 31reasons 12y ago" Nature's internal costs of publishing run at £20,000–30,000 (US$31,000–47,000) per paper, an extremely high charge to load onto authors or funders rather than spread over subscribers." What in the digital world would make it so expensive to publish content ?
- peteretep 12y agoPaid editorial and peer review? Also, if a print-copy is being produced, someone has to type-set it, even if there's also a digital copy.
- s0rce 12y agoPeer review is not paid. I assume costs are for the staff editors (PhDs), copy editors, type setters, print and distribution costs, etc. Source: I have published in nature
- 12y ago
- r0h1n 12y agoBetter headline: Nature will allow subscribers and media to decide who else can view articles for free
- untilHellbanned 12y agoWhen you are feeling all touchy feely about this move, keep in mind the profit margins at academic publishers are higher than Apple. Yes, THAT Apple. Source: https://alexholcombe.wordpress.com/2013/01/09/scholarly-publishers-and-their-high-profits/ https://alexholcombe.wordpress.com/2013/01/09/scholarly-publ...
- skosuri 12y agoI've looked into these numbers and it's really hard to parse what revenues and expenses are coming from their journal publishing. The publishers listed are also have huge amounts of revenue in textbooks and other book markets (to be fair, another awful scam). It might be better to look at non-profit publishers such as ACS and AAAS, which are also mainly closed-access. For example, AAAS which has Science magazine and a few other journals brought in 48M w/ 42M in expenses [1]. That said, they bring in 11M as well in member dues, which more than anything else gets you subscription to AAAS journals. It's harder to tell with ACS, because it also includes revenues for CAS and other services [2]. PLoS, an open access publisher, seems to generally have lower costs based on an author pays model FWIW. [1] pg 50 of http://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/AAAS_2013-Annual-Report.pdf http://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/AAAS_2013-Annual-Rep... [2] https://acswebcontent.acs.org/annualreport/financials_financialsummary.html https://acswebcontent.acs.org/annualreport/financials_financ... [3] http://www.plos.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/2013-2014-Progress-Update-financial-page.gif http://www.plos.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/2013-2014-Pro...
- chbrown 12y agoMy institution subscribes to Nature, and using my library's proxy to access the Nature website, I can use the "Share/bookmark" menu to generate links like http://rdcu.be/bKk4 http://rdcu.be/bKk4, http://rdcu.be/bKlc http://rdcu.be/bKlc, http://rdcu.be/bKld http://rdcu.be/bKld, and http://rdcu.be/bKli http://rdcu.be/bKli, which can be viewed in the browser (or maybe only because I also just installed the ReadCube app?). The articles linked to above span several months, but it's generating serial links, so I can only assume that it's able to track visits back to the subscriber and/or my university account. The ReadCube HTML5 reader looks nice, but does not work with JavaScript disabled (no surprise there). It uses JavaScript to override text selection (disabling copy&paste), but after a little meddling with the developer tools and element inspector, you can find a decently near ancestor to the text and copy the DOM as html. Stick that into a new file and you can select (and copy) the text without too much further hassle. The DOM is awkward and split up kind of like a PDF (selecting a range of text goes haywire in unpredictable cases), but in comparing the HTML DOM hierarchy to the text object structure in the original PDF (which, as a subscriber, I can download), I found no obvious similarities, so I'm guessing they aren't translating the PDF to HTML directly.
- gergles 12y agoIt is awful awful awful to show the "PDF download" button then go "Ha ha, no!" when you click it. Such a shitty UX.
- saeguaiga 12y agoShould be "replicate experiment, writeup and peer review;" there, fixed it for you. You know the userscript.
- lomnakkus 12y agoIndeed. My options were 1: "$3.99 rent, $9.99 buy" (the was called the "ReadCube access" option) 2: Purchase article full text and PDF: $8 (had no annotations, so presumably the "Nature" option) In either case this is NOT "free". Nature, try again.
- ynniv 12y ago
- c0ur7n3y 12y agoDoes the browser viewer use the new W3C DRM extensions?
- c0ur7n3y 12y agoDoes the in-browser viewer use the new W3C-blessed DRM extensions?
- therzathegza 12y agoFor those not in the know, Nature is THE journal to be in if you want to be successful in bioscience. It is peer reviewed, fairly exclusive, and they generally only publish game changer style science. If you are in science, and you get a first author Nature paper, your ticket is punched and you are about to have a moderately successful career. For all the nitpicking going on about the delivery method, searching, and it not being "enough", this will largely not matter to scientists. Articles are generally shared by DOI or PMID, indexing is very specific. If not, relevant papers in the field are nearly known by heart and new info from competing labs is checked on daily. Problems 1 and 2 are not as underserved as HN thinks. This is a monster announcement for institutions that may not have the money for a Nature sub, and the public at large to have better access to such a powerful archive of historically hidden info. The fact that it's not delivered in a DRM-free format for every device ever all the way back to the oldest article is nothing compared to how incredibly huge this is. I am spamming this to all my old lab buddies as we speak. TL;DR: The output system for academic publishing sucks at the high end, but it just got a lot less sucky.
- silencio 12y agoThere's pubmed search in the readcube app itself and it works fine. I don't see that as a concern. DRM is frustrating but not the big problem right now. What I have a problem with, and I think most of the comments here are along the same lines, is that they're calling this "free" when it's really "free if you get a link from someone with a subscription already". It's an improvement but barely. As a member of the public greatly missing the access I used to have through school just to satiate my curiosity, the way I get access now is exactly the same as what I did before so it's not really "better access to historically hidden info". I don't see how it's any better for cash-strapped institutions. I ask a friend with access if I don't find it on libgen, booksc, etc. first. Actually, the "can you send me a link" is rather stupid...I get PDFs now, why would I downgrade to DRM and a shitty restricted PDF reader? And the idea of creating libgen-esque sites to share readcube links seems like begging for publishers to revoke said links. It would be cool if more publications online start to share articles when referencing them. That's the nice benefit to me, at least. No hiccup between reading about something and searching/waiting for the article.
- ForFreedom 12y agoI installed readcube for mac and the app was unable to connect to get the articles. Is anyone having such an issue?
- gpvos 12y agoLimited is the new free.
- passepartout 12y ago"Everything is free to read* they say. But there’s an asterisk, pesky and persistent, next to read. And it’s a big one.The asterisk is that you can’t do anything but read the document, and you have to download use their proprietary reader software in order to read the document, and you have to hope that someone who has a subscription or is a journalist is kind enough to share a link to the document that you want to read, and if you try to do anything other than look at the document passively on a screen you’re basically gonna get sued for copyright infringement." http://del-fi.org/post/104125242971/natures-shareware-moment http://del-fi.org/post/104125242971/natures-shareware-moment But by all means, let's celebrate a step forward taken by Nature.
- andrewparker 12y agoDoes this BS marketing PR stunt qualify Nature-published research papers for Gates Foundation-backed research now? Meaning: does this announcement qualify Nature as "open" enough for the Gates Foundation?
- nemoniac 12y agoTo take advantage of this you need a piece of software called Readcube which is available only for Windows and Mac. Users of Linux and Android cannot avail of it.
- dimitrideag 12y agoOne step more towards the Democratization of knowledge!
- hawleyal 12y agoNot free at all.
- s0rce 12y agoWell here is the link to my paper in Nature http://rdcu.be/bKB9 http://rdcu.be/bKB9
- angrydev 12y agoThis is a lame half assed solution.
- Animats 12y agoNature did not make all articles free to view. That's a misleading announcement. What they did is far more limited. If you have a paid Nature subscription, you can get a link which you can send to someone else. They can then read a DRM-protected PDF-like file through a proprietary on-line viewer. If you want to read an article right now, it's $18 and up. Or you can now "rent" the article for $3.99 and up and view it in their proprietary viewer for a short period. This is decidedly not "open access publication".
- tempodox 12y agoI never paid anything to view birds and snakes and lice and dogs and cats and... Did someone hijack nature to extort money from unsuspecting passers-by?