Open science: why is it so hard?

It's not hard, it's that most researchers just don't care. Most researchers have access to all papers they need through their universities, and if they don't, most papers are only an email away. Publishing in those journals for which you need to pay (which is only a minority) is paid for by grands or the university. How many people do you know who couldn't get their papers published <i>only</i> because they couldn't afford the journal charges?<p>The truth is that only a small (albeit vocal) minority cares about 'open science'. For most researchers, it just doesn't matter, and there is no incentive to pursue it. Actually having time to write papers worth publishing is more of an issue than those that do get published being accessible to people who, in all honesty, have no interested in them (i.e., the general public).<p>(it's quite interesting to note that (in my statistically undoubtedly non-representative experience) the demographic that advocates 'open access' the most is quite homogeneous - mostly PhD students with a new professor here and there. Maybe it's the cynical me, but I've been in the game long enough to see people I meet at conferences convert from being advocates for open access to not caring about it any more once they get some years of experience and realize it doesn't matter that much.)

Astronomers are incredibly dedicated to outreach. You can get data used by professional astronomers in publicly-accessible databases on the web. Here's a collection of these resources:<p><a href="http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/help/links.html" rel="nofollow">http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/help/links.html</a><p>The challenge is you have to learn a bit about the databases and visualization software to get going. Then you might need to learn some electromagnetism, relativity, and astrophysics to interpret the data. There are excellent tutorials, some many years old, that you can find.<p>Open science is hard because science is hard. It takes knowledge to interpret the data. It takes effort to transform the data into something that can be interpreted. And there's a lot of data.

I think it's difficult to refute that if the funding was public, the results should be public. But the scientists have to publish in big journals to win public funding grants, and the big journals aren't motivated to go open access and surrender their cash cow.<p>So you're not likely to budge either the scientists or the journals by arguing about what's ethical. It seems to me like the best approach is to change the way public grants are awarded. If grants become conditional on you ONLY publishing in open access journals, well you don't have much choice do you? Ultimately this whole game was only ever about attracting the money you need to do your job. Pretty soon the expensive publishers stop getting submissions because they're all diverted to open-access journals.<p>Of course it would never be so easy in reality. There is a pretty entrenched chicken-and-egg situation with science publications, and it will be unavoidably messy to break it.

I find it really aggravating that schools such as the ETHZ get billions in taxes a year yet refuse to publish the majority of their papers online.

I am an Engineer and an Operations Research professional. Yet I have mostly worked for companies that do not do engineering or are very small organizations. They do not want to allocate me the resources to research or software. So I've had to rely on what is open. I've used Free Software as a toolset to perform a lot of my work. Yet access to the research behind a lot of those tools is very hard to come by. Places like Penn State's Citeseer <a href="http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/index" rel="nofollow">http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/index</a> and R-Project <a href="http://r-project.org" rel="nofollow">http://r-project.org</a> have been a great haven for open research for my work.<p>I do believe science should be open. Yet I also believe that the scientists behind the research should be compensated. But all the while there is great research out there sitting behind a publisher that limits access to us practitioners who do not have the resources to gain access. I think there is definitely an opportunity to find somewhere in-between where the two can meet.

What open access does do is help researchers in smaller institutions and institutions in poorer countries to have easier access to papers.<p>This is HUGE. If you work/study at a place with less resources it becomes annoying to try and get papers for journals your instn doesn't subscribe to. This is a barrier to research that just should not be there.

One of the reasons the status quo is very hard to change is that academia is built on reputation and prestige, and there is really no other measure of success. That means that if we are at some stable steady state going outside the system and doing something like opening up your data to everyone versus trying to publish in a brand name journal will be a disadvantage to you since the number of publications in these types of journals are they way that you are judged. The issue isn't about whether the journals charge for content or not. Journal subscriptions are cheap compared to labor and reagents and, as always with third-party payer systems, the incentives aren't really aligned to skimp on them. The real question are there better ways of giving people credit for their work in a way that enhances their career in a proportional way to their achievement? Are alternative systems better for rewarding the right people faster, and thus moving research faster? The answer may be yes, but there is a significant energy of activation barrier to making any kind of switch from the publishing-as-a-measure-of-achievement model.

Open is not profitable?

&#62; Repeat after me: scholarship is not a publishing business.<p>Nope - it's much more than that. It's a way for a caste of too-often incompetent and self-absorbed university dwellers to perpetrate itself.<p>I've had the misfortune of working in university for a while. People on department are living in a bubble - they write books and they publish on journals that are read only by other professor "studying" the same "subject". They treat subjects like "the history of mining in scandinavia". Why? Because they're often the <i>only</i> person in the world (or one of the 2-3 people in the world) who is studying that. What does it mean? A grant, and later a position as a full-time professor. Everyone of them has his small little niche in which he's the best specialist in the world... that is used to both justify their research and to avoid real world competition.<p>Publishing rules will never change if the underlying ecosystem doesn't. If professors will ever be interested in <i>expanding</i> their audience (now they're interested in the <i>opposite</i>) then publishing will change accordingly.