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[dustywayfarer]

The Steep Paywalls of Many Scientific Journals

 
This thread split off from the impending doom thread when the herds of text-walls leaped over the bounds of what some wanted to read, leaving them tired of scrolling past them.

If you're bored by a discussion of Open Access policies for scientific literature, don't bother reading this thread.

[dustywayfarer]

Thanks Trekkin and Jimmy; I got quite a bit out of both your posts, and enjoyed reading them. While I may not have the life experience to fully understand Trekkin's concern about individuals misinterpreting freely available scientific information, that's ok. What I've gathered is that many individuals' opinions (concerning the necessity of steep paywalls) boil down to how much value the journals are perceived to be producing versus consuming. Value is not only subjective, but in the case of the scientific journals, percieved in wildly different ways. It's unlikely that any real person would cleanly fit in any of the following five boxes, but I had fun making them anyway.

1. Some would consider steep journal subscriptions to be quite necessary for the purpose of preventing the unlearned and unstable from wresting valuable scientific information to their own destruction. The protection provided by the journal paywall is precious, and worth the money. It seems readily apparent to such people that in most cases where someone is either unable or unwilling to pay, the individual desiring access most likely doesn't have the scientific background necessary to properly use the information.

2. Others would consider steep journal subscriptions necessary for the purpose of hiring the very best intellectuals to curate the scientific content presented. Whether or not others get to read the excellent content is a non-issue, because to them, content quality is so important that it eclipses most other considerations.

3. Still others recognize that a journal without a paywall would soon cease to exist. Because other funding sources are insufficient or not feasible and because they are blessed with sufficient funds, they happily pay. This group may or may not be content with the amount required, but usually any dissatisfaction these individuals experience stems from a perception that the journals profit margin is too high or a similar perception that, by and large, their money is being used to fund something besides research and publication. They feel the journal could produce the same for less money. This is the box I currently fit in, though I don't have any legitimate support for the idea that journals are wasting money, and I don't have the money to pay for articles I'd like to read that aren't part of the subscriptions I have access to.

4. Others value the wide distribution of all information to the extent that that for them, scientific journals produce almost no value for their large cost. In these minds, journals should be and remain free for all, and they take steps to make their dreams come true.

5. College students have deadlines, and for those who have neither access to the articles that they need nor ready money to pay for each article they use, paywalls become the stuff of nightmares. Most United States college students have access to subscriptions of some form or another, but these are not always sufficiently comprehensive. Professors and reasearchers at any institution or corporation 'worth their salt' presumably have access, though a librarian at Harvard once raised sufficient fuss at journal fees that the Guardian published about it, for whatever that's worth.

[Trekkin]

Your analysis is informative, but paywalls are multifunctional constructs and the different functions they serve should be evaluated individually. Paywalls do three basic things: they help support the journal process, they wall cutting-edge science off from the general public, and they also stop researchers with fewer resources at their disposal from accessing resources they otherwise might.

So, if we're going to talk about if paywalls are necessary, we should probably ask the following prior to that:

1. Should scientific knowledge be available to anyone? If so, how should we ensure it's accurate, and who should fund that process?
2. Should scientific knowledge be available to everyone? If so, what steps should be taken to make sure it's complete and comprehensible insofar as individual readers are concerned, and who should fund that process?

All snark aside, this is an important debate to have, and if you want a sensible answer out of it, let alone an actionable one, it's worth looking at the current structure with both the economic and the pedagogical concerns in mind.

Now, if you'd like an example of individuals misinterpreting freely available scientific information, here is one with real consequences: there's an urban legend in certain countries that getting vaccinated for yellow fever will make them more susceptible to dengue virus infection, and so people at risk for yellow fever refuse to get vaccinated...and then, as you might expect, they get yellow fever. They cite a real phenomenon in defense of this belief; it's called antibody-dependent enhancement, or ADE, and it's part of the difference between dengue fever and dengue hemorrhagic fever, as well as a real concern for dengue virus development. Similar viruses can be more infectious in patients with antibodies to different serotypes than the one they're currently infected with, it's true. However, for a number of structural and biochemical reasons, yellow fever vaccination doesn't cause ADE when vaccinated persons are infected with dengue. It just does not happen. It's a myth founded on crude phyologenetic analysis and exacerbated by distrust of pharmaceuticals -- and because of this myth, people get sick that otherwise wouldn't, all because someone read about ADE and figured YFV and DENV were close enough genetically for it to happen and didn't check.

Things like that are what I worry would run rampant if everyone had access to things they've never been taught how to read. Things like that, and worse things still.

[TalonisWolf]

But if you're worried about people getting wrong conclusions due to their lack of expertise in a subject, who's going to be deciding when someone has enough expertise for access to a subject?

And more relevant to your point, how is a paywall supposed to curb that? Intelligence and/or Knowledge of a subject does not always go hand in hand with Wealth, but people with sufficient wealth tend to have connections which can spread misinformation more widely.

If the paywall was a for a guarantee of accurate information, that'd be different, but from the concerns you're raising that isn't the case?

For the record, I'd like to note I'd be in the group of people who don't know enough to be coming to conclusions from scientific papers. That just leaves me more concerned about issues which may lock out those who can, so this has caught my interest.

[Trekkin]

But if you're worried about people getting wrong conclusions due to their lack of expertise in a subject, who's going to be deciding when someone has enough expertise for access to a subject?

And more relevant to your point, how is a paywall supposed to curb that? Intelligence and/or Knowledge of a subject does not always go hand in hand with Wealth, but people with sufficient wealth tend to have connections which can spread misinformation more widely.

If the paywall was a for a guarantee of accurate information, that'd be different, but from the concerns you're raising that isn't the case?

For the record, I'd like to note I'd be in the group of people who don't know enough to be coming to conclusions from scientific papers. That just leaves me more concerned about issues which may lock out those who can, so this has caught my interest.

These are all good questions. Right now, it's decided mostly by association; you get access if some entity with an extensible form of access sees an advantage in giving it to you. That's the really general answer. In specific, most people have access in college; beyond that, being hired by someone who buys you journal access is generally a matter of impressing people with PhDs enough to want you working for them -- over and over, as any graduate student can attest.

So it's crude and indirect, but generally people with a demonstrable need to learn have someone paying their way. I don't know many people who pay subscription fees directly out of their own pocket at the rates you see on the websites. Generally, real universities are more willing to hire legitimate scientists than crystal healers and baraminologists, so the pool of people who can read paywalled articles is enriched for people who have been trained to do so since they're the ones who get jobs that come with subscriptions. It is an imperfect system to be sure, but it's better than no system at all.

And those paywalls are part of a guarantee of accurate information, but that accuracy only matters if you can correctly process the information contained within. Editors filter out the junk science and plagarism and pass the possibly good submissions onto reviewers, who must also agree on the merit and accuracy and novelty of the article for it to be published. It's a good system as far as it goes, but all those checks are made with an informed audience in mind. Sticking error bars on all your graphs doesn't do anything for people who don't know what they mean numerically, for example, and that's not even touching the giant mountains of jargon used in science to communicate precisely. Accuracy doesn't just mean what you say is right, it also means what your audience hears is right, and that means educating the public is considerably more involved than just informing each other.

I guess my point is that a replacement to paywalls has to include a funding stream for the editoriql process -- which is fundamental to maintaining scientific standards -- as well as an alternative means of gating access to science; even if you want there to be no restrictions, you presumably still want accuracy to be maintained. Further, getting accurate information into the heads of the general public is going to mean rewriting papers in vernacular languages while adding copious expository asides, and that's even more expensive.

In other words, right now we have a system that lets us publish accurate papers given certain expectations of the audience's understanding of background concepts. Maintaining those standards of accuracy with respect to the general public is going to mean turning those papers into textbook-length documents so any average Joe can't get confused, and that's even more expensive than the current process.

[MrRoboto75]

Generally speaking, while in college and even in high school, I had free access to the library's array of academic databases.  I used the college ones the most when it came to my writing intensive class, which circled around interpreting papers in my field.

It'd be nice if my university extended access to me as an alumni, but either way I'd doubt I'd use it much outside of high level employment or schoolwork.

[dustywayfarer]

Trekkin, it seems hard to argue with your point that journals need operational funding. However, leaving economic concerns aside for a moment due to the difficulty of discovering audits explaining exactly how journals spend their money, lets talk about pedagogy. In response to your example of phylogenetic confusion, wouldn't the act of finding alternative means of funding and enabling open access for all itself promote the practice of fact-checking and give people more opportunity to learn how to properly understand the material presented?

Speaking for myself, I learn by doing. I best learn to understand journal articles by reading them, and yes, I have taken classes in statistics and experimental design. Could this be the source of the difference in our worldview? You seem to think that people must first learn how to read before they can properly read, but I would reflexively contend (due to my learning style and lack of life experience) that individuals learn best by trying. Could our own preferred methods of learning be a source of bias for both of us?

[Trekkin]

Trekkin, it seems hard to argue with your point that journals need operational funding. However, leaving economic concerns aside for a moment due to the difficulty of discovering audits explaining exactly how journals spend their money, lets talk about pedagogy. In response to your example of phylogenetic confusion, wouldn't the act of finding alternative means of funding and enabling open access for all itself promote the practice of fact-checking and give people more opportunity to learn how to properly understand the material presented?

Speaking for myself, I learn by doing. I best learn to understand journal articles by reading them, and yes, I have taken classes in statistics and experimental design. Could this be the source of the difference in our worldview? You seem to think that people must first learn how to read before they can properly read, but I would reflexively contend (due to my learning style and lack of life experience) that individuals learn best by trying. Could our own preferred methods of learning be a source of bias for both of us?

   To your first question, it depends, and to your second question, certainly.
   It depends on what you mean by "opportunity", really. As an analogy, we both have the "opportunity" to climb Mt. Everest in the sense that the mountain is there and we're technologically capable of reaching the top, but I certainly don't have the time to go to Nepal and actually do that, so I arguably can't despite the opportunity. Likewise, not many people have the free time to conduct literature searches for free, even of the literature they already have available -- especially since it's going to take far longer for people who aren't trained to do it efficiently, and longer still if they have to learn the theory before they can make sense of the data.
   The other problem is that, unlike climbing a mountain, there's no obvious place to stop checking your understanding of the facts against the facts themselves. Anyone who reads a paper will come away with some understanding of it, but it might not necessarily square with everything in the paper, let alone everything we know. Further, they will have confidence in their understanding -- and, unfortunately, that confidence scales inversely with the information they used to reach it, per the Dunning-Kruger effect. There are infinitely many ways to be wrong and they all look right at first glance, like with my virus example. I just worry that people are, quite understandably, too busy to go back and have a second and third and fiftieth look for themselves and make sure they're justified in their conclusions.
   It's absolutely sensible to learn to read journal articles by reading them; in fact, I don't know any other way to do it. It's just not sufficient on its own, it's not at all a fast process, and not everyone has the opportunity to go through it in the sense of having the time and inclination to do that instead of whatever else they might do.
   If we're going to take seriously our obligation to educate the public, we should recognize that it's incumbent upon the educator to simplify the material to suit the pupils so they get some use out of it. When we teach little kids about how plants work, we tell them they need sunlight and water and soil, but not how photosynthesis works biochemically, because it's all meaningless jargon without first establishing how matter works on molecular scales and they don't have the necessary thermodynamics yet. Handing elementary schoolers a paper on the structure of P680 would be worse than useless; it'd just confuse them and make them feel dumb. 
   Yes, having greater access to primary literature than they already do would lower the barrier to entry for people to understand science, but it's still too high for the average person to spend the time to cross and there's not much of immediate use to them on the other side. There's so much more that needs to be done to make primary literature accessible to the public in a real, useful sense than just handing them shedloads of information -- and, as I said in the last thread and above, there are people who will misuse that access to spread dangerous misinformation in ways that need real understanding to combat.
   So if you want to give everyone access to everything, how do you plan to insulate them from their resultant ability to lie to themselves and each other far more plausibly, bearing in mind that access to information and the ability to understand it are separated by a time-consuming and costly educational process that most people couldn't afford even if it were free?

To return to my mountain analogy, yes, right now there's a fence around the top -- but given that the mountain is covered in landmines with a density that increases as you approach the peak, perhaps there is some sense in insisting that people walk along the marked path up to the gate and take the accompanying minesweeping course or just settle for looking at it. Take the fence away and people will make their own way up, and they're almost certain to tread on a mine and think homeopathy makes sense.

[wierd]

I'm not sure homeopathy is a good example there... It very much is straight up magical thinking, almost wholly deriving from sympathetic magic. ("This is superficially like that, so it totally has an effect!!" et al.) The fundemental change from magical to critical thinking would make you immediately suspicious of it, and any rigorous exploration would reveal it to be the horse-shit that it is.  I will agree with you that people need to be fully converted from magical thinking mode (which humans seem hard wired for, sadly-- Not sure if that is completely true or not, but humans in many different cultural settings all operate with similar modes of thought without the benefit of more rigorous systematic approaches, suggesting some form of natural predilection, the nature of which I can only speculate on) into critical thinking mode before being allowed access is even close to sensible, as viewing science in the light of magic and magical thought is so wrong, and so dangerous, I dont even know where to begin.  However, for those that have already crossed that bridge, and want to know more about the systematic processes being used to better understand the universe we find ourselves in, being allowed access to that information, and information on how those processes were arrived at, is very valuable. 

To keep your mountain path analogy, using a well blazed trail is good for most purposes, but you can never know if you missed something important on the way to the top if you are hard-nosed in asserting that it is the "one, proper way."  Many interesting things have come from independent researchers reaching the same conclusion through different paths, but using the same kinds of systematic approaches to assure their work is free from observer bias, and as free from error as is experimentally possible with the tools and methods known about at the time of the work.  I recall an interesting anecdote about two biochemists from different branches of applied biochemistry (one from oncology, and one from botanical science specializing in herbicides) bumped into each other and discovered they were exploring the same class of organic compounds, then shared their data with each other to greatly expand their pools of research candidates, with positive results. (Sadly, I cannot seem to find the actual story now though.   I dont blame you for being skeptical of the story without a primary source.) 

A more prominent example of why sticking to blazed trails can be bad, and being hardnosed about keeping people on those paths, can be seen in the theoretical math world with Gregory Perelman, with his independent proof of the Poincaré conjecture.  Perelman is kinda (in)famous for refusing the prize for this solution, asserting that the proof itself is the prize. His work is considered to be inelegant by many in the theoretical math world, but has so far held up to scrutiny, owing to its independent means of production. The blazed trails in that field had resulted in seemingly intractable problems with formulating a reliable proof, and many false positives had been put forth over the decades since the formal submission of the conjecture.  Being a hard-nosed gatekeeper would have kept Perelman from even knowing about the conjecture, let alone independently work on it, and find a novel proof.

I admit that such occurrences are rare, but hardline adherence removes even that rare potential that can have profound effect, as this instance did.

I would be perfectly fine with a simple test to determine if you have the necessary cognition to avoid magical hoodoo thinking before being given access, and for that to have some kind of price tag, as long as that was not some really costly thing to obtain. (Like a trade certificate, or similar)  That would solve the problem of keeping most charlatans and hoodoo sellers out of the honey pot, and revocation of their trade cert would be an effective punishment to prevent recidivism for the cases that do happen.  I understand that you will try to assert that such a thing already somewhat exists in the form of advanced degrees, but you cannot just go to a university and say "Hey, I want to test out of all this shit, give me the final right now."  That is not how that works, but it is what would be needed if you want to accept independent scholarship as a less mainstream but still viable road, in order to keep those beneficial side pollination opportunities.  Being hard-nosed on the university trained route is just another way of saying "you must be this rich, or know this many rich people to join the club."

[Trekkin]

I would be perfectly fine with a simple test to determine if you have the necessary cognition to avoid magical hoodoo thinking before being given access, and for that to have some kind of price tag, as long as that was not some really costly thing to obtain. (Like a trade certificate, or similar)  That would solve the problem of keeping most charlatans and hoodoo sellers out of the honey pot, and revocation of their trade cert would be an effective punishment to prevent recidivism for the cases that do happen.  I understand that you will try to assert that such a thing already somewhat exists in the form of advanced degrees, but you cannot just go to a university and say "Hey, I want to test out of all this shit, give me the final right now."  That is not how that works, but it is what would be needed if you want to accept independent scholarship as a less mainstream but still viable road, in order to keep those beneficial side pollination opportunities.  Being hard-nosed on the university trained route is just another way of saying "you must be this rich, or know this many rich people to join the club."

You can absolutely do that; the test takes around four years to administer, and it's called college. It's not a test like most people think of tests because we're not interested in knowing if you can learn to say the right things when asked. Almost anyone can do that, and by the time you learned them they'd be obsolete for our purposes anyway. The test concerns whether you want to learn enough to learn even when you're surrounded by other amusements and distractions, and whether you can learn efficiently enough on your own time to pass all the little tests in the time allotted. It's also a test of your perspicacity in recognizing that the whole system, as presented, is a ludicrous waste of your time; you've got four years to figure out how to distinguish yourself from everyone who merely does what they're asked and ticks the boxes set in front of them with whatever they've memorized, and we make sure you have more than enough opportunity to take explicit tests to take up your time if you've really come to the conclusion that they are what matters. A diploma doesn't mean you passed. A diploma means you sat the test and didn't quit halfway through. Your CV tells us whether or not you passed.

But we can't make a simple test. A simple test would defeat the point of testing how you handle complexity. Nor can we make a quick test to check endurance, or a pleasant test to watch your reactions to adversity. We cannot make an obvious test of your ability to grasp subtle things, or a mandatory test of how motivated you are. We cannot make college any of these things and have it still do what we need it to do.

We could make it free, though, and I absolutely think the state should provide sufficient funding for it to be so; this is one area the politicians don't know how to control in any real way, so it's safe to take their money. If you want to make it easier to sit the test and more about the student than their circumstances, I'm in complete agreement with you. I just think that process should be a part of, rather than an alternative to, making sure anyone who wants access to raw science has the background to handle it correctly. Once you're through that gate, go nuts with whatever you want to do, independent or no -- but that gate is only partly field-specific anyway.

[wierd]

While I would greatly love fully subsidized higher education, (and would make use of it with gusto), your argument completely misses the point, and your further statement that the degree is not the metric by which you are evaluated for having "made it", (as you say, it is the CV score you have for publishing new works)-- If you can honestly get there on your own without the university behind you, you dont need the 4 years spent there, other than to prove that you took the path most traveled.

Again, there is value to not taking that road, if you can honestly do it on your own, as it brings fresh and new perspectives to the research front.

So, "ZOOM" right over your head, apparently.

[Trekkin]

While I would greatly love fully subsidized higher education, (and would make use of it with gusto), your argument completely misses the point, and your further statement that the degree is not the metric by which you are evaluated for having "made it", (as you say, it is the CV score you have for publishing new works)-- If you can honestly get there on your own without the university behind you, you dont need the 4 years spent there, other than to prove that you took the path most traveled.

Again, there is value to not taking that road, if you can honestly do it on your own, as it brings fresh and new perspectives to the research front.

So, "ZOOM" right over your head, apparently.

Not my argument. I'm saying the university isn't ever behind you; it's only ever in your way, and by design. It is the test you are asking for. Going to university is the test, and you pass by doing something useful with your time there as well as whatever we make you do. That's how we know you're capable of what you need to do to handle raw science in a sensible way.

Going around university isn't skipping to the test. It's skipping past it. There are alternative tests available, but they are very much sui generis and cannot be fair, let alone the standard.

Also, a CV isn't a score and doesn't necessarily have to do with publications. It stands for "curriculum vitae"; it's a long-form resume.

[wierd]

That makes university education into a "one true path."  as I pointed out, that is not optimal.

[Trekkin]

That makes university education into a "one true path."  as I pointed out, that is not optimal.

It's a step on that path, yes, much like the trade certificate you proposed. People would be complaining that they were unfairly excluded from that, too, and that they should be passed without taking it.

University is just a better test than anything as quick and easy as that, for the reasons I outlined above.

[dustywayfarer]

I've read the thoughts presented here, and after thinking about it for a bit, I agree that college is a way to distinguish the dedicated and self-motivated from the rest. However, a fundamental difference of thought keeps me from conceding that any barrier needs to be erected between those who don't have the time or education to 'properly' understand scientific material and the trove of extant scientific literature. If presented with the option of either protecting someone from harm at the expense of learning, or allowing them to try and have the opportunity to fail, but also the opportunity to grow, I would immediately choose freedom over security. This places me at odds with many, many people in many more arenas than this one. Perhaps the only way I can somewhat reconcile the disparity between our schools of thought is to say that I don't have the life experience to see the overall inferiority of such a philosophy. True, individuals may come to harm, but not all, and the ones who don't will be better off for it. Those who do stumble only have themselves to blame. I cannot understand how deferring to individual decision leaves one responsible for the outcome.

True, journals need money to operate, and I'm not in any position to dictate how much that amount should be. I do take umbrage at any instance of a journal charging any more than absolutely necessary or taking the easy way out by charging the reader for the bulk of their operational expenses. I believe their goal should instead be to shift as much weight off the reader as possible. Didn't the free exchange of information spark the industrial revolution? Granted, said revolution had some serious problems from the perspectives of ecology and human rights, but I doubt that excessive paywalls to keep the ignorant masses out would have solved either of those. I'm treading on an example that I know almost nothing about, so I shall say no more.