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Space & Planetary Science

You Can't Read About Billions of Habitable Zone Planets Unless You Pay (Update)

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
November 5, 2013
Filed under ,

Prevalence of Earth-size planets orbiting Sun-like stars, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (full article behind paywall)
“We find that 22% of Sun-like stars harbor Earth-size planets orbiting in their habitable zones. The nearest such planet may be within 12 light-years.”
1 in 5 Sun-like Stars Has Earth-size Planet in Habitable Zone, UC Berkeley
“The research was funded by UC Berkeley and the National Science Foundation, with the assistance of the Keck Observatories and NASA.”
NASA paywalls first papers arising from Curiosity rover, I am setting them free, Michael Eisen, UC Berkeley
“This whole situation is even more absurd, because US copyright law explicitly says that all works of the federal government – of which these surely must be included – are not subject to copyright. So, in the interests of helping NASA and Science Magazine comply with US law, I am making copies of these papers freely available here”
Keith’s 5 Nov update: PNAS has finally made this paper available to the public free of charge. Its just baffling how NASA is unable to coordinate this sort of thing in advance rather than after the fact. Now, will NASA make a point of letting people know that this paper is online?

Keith’s 4 Nov note: This stunning, groundbreaking research was funded by NSF and NASA (via tax dollars), announced at a NASA press conference regarding data from a NASA spacecraft (paid for with tax dollars) and … that’s right – you have to pay money to read the article. (2 days for $10.00, 7 days for $25.00.) An index page says it is “open access” but that is not how it is set up – check the image of the login/pay box you get on the right. And NASA won’t post it either (they never do). Oh yes, the journal that is charging you for access is published by the National Academy of Sciences which itself is almost totally dependent on government grants (recycled tax dollars).
Why isn’t this paper posted on arXiv.org like so many other Kepler papers are – like this one and this one?
I applaud UC Berkeley’s Michael Eisen for his earlier stance on freely circulating publications from NASA Mars research and hope that he’ll convince his fellow UC Berkeley faculty member (Geoff Marcy) to do the same. Hey wait: …. didn’t Geoff Marcy get all upset about lack of openness, access, exchange of data and all that when NASA banned Chinese scientists from attending and participating in this very same conference?
Boycott planned over Chinese nationals banned from NASA conference, PBS Newshour
“Geoff Marcy, an astronomy professor at the University of California at Berkeley, told the Guardian: “It is completely unethical for the United States of America to exclude certain countries from pure science research.” Marcy has said he will not attend the conference.”
C’mon Geoff. Set your (our) data free about all of these potentially habitable planets. We paid for the research. Its the “ethical” thing to do.
NASA Hides Science Behind Paywalls, earlier post

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

22 responses to “You Can't Read About Billions of Habitable Zone Planets Unless You Pay (Update)”

  1. Duncan Young says:
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    What is the appropriate way of paying for publication, in a way that filters for quality? In the open access model, authors pay for publication, which puts the incentive on journals to publish any old rubbish (I get about 4 emails a day soliciting papers from such journals) In the paywall model, the journal has the incentive to only filter for very hi impact science, with some loss of the boring grunt work of science that is neccessary to document. In both cases, unpaid reviewers do much of the work. However, given the well documented failures of federal outreach efforts, (not to mention shutdown and sequester uncertainities, and the potential for direct political interference) it’s not clear that a public solution would be any better. It is clear that with so much science now being generated, there is a role for curation by a recognizable brand.

    To paraphase Churchill, academic publishing may be the worst system for sharing information… except for all the other ones that could be tried…

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      Indeed. While our host reliably takes the ‘open’ approach, and makes a strong case (“it’s tax payer dollars!”), I’m not so sure. What the taxpayer-this taxpayer-expects is the highest quality. And I can assure you that this tax payer isn’t able to sort out what’s important, and what’s not important.

      As Mr. Young points out, that’s the job of the publishers, and by and large they do a good job. On the other hand, perhaps these publishers could make the data available at a more approachable price. Profits, for example, at Elsevier are in the billions per year. Or they could make available summaries readable by the general public.

      • dogstar29 says:
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        Under the pay-for-access model the publishers can only profit if those who cannot pay are denied access to scientific knowledge. This model inevitably limits the dissemination of knowledge and thus slows progress.

        The illusion is that the traditional publishers add value. In many fields 90% of what is published in traditional journals has no practical value in advancing the field. We have thousands of papers but no cures. Moreover, anyone who takes a published paper as “established fact” without confirmation from others, just because it appears in a traditional journal, is naive. Yet a new author with a new idea can be roadblocked by a reviewer who doesn’t agree with it, and the reviewers are pressured to deny publication to papers without a high “impact”.

        Peer review is already provided free by other scientists, as shown by the peer-reviewed open press like PLoS. Although PLoS has publication fees, they are minor compared to the cost of actually doing research, much less than the cost of buying access to every paper one reads, and can be waived for those who have no outside support and can’t afford it.

        • Michael Spencer says:
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          Respectfully I believe you are confounding issues. The fact that many papers are published and never cited (or, as you say, have ‘no practical value’ in the field) isn’t really relevant. Dead ends are part of the process, and they are every bit as necessary as the singular and rare home run: knowing what’s not true helsp find what IS true.

          I cannot quibble though with the high volume driven by publish or perish, as you rightly point out.

          • Steve Whitfield says:
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            All of this is secondary to the basic issue — NASA-sponsored data and reports are supposed to be in the public domain; it’s been that way since day one.
            It’s bad enough that NASA funding for publications and public outreach being cut has reduced their ability to make materials available to the public, as per their charter, but this pay-wall business, whether by improper intent or by oversight, is like a brick wall between the public and the information they are by long-standing legislation entitled to.

  2. asdf says:
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    It seems that the article is supposed to be open-access. Unfortunately I don’t see how I can read the article without being prompted for login.

    • kcowing says:
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      I agree. It says “open access” on an index page but when you click on links you can see it is a for-pay article. This compounds the annoyance.

      • asdf says:
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        It looks like the authors have opted for the “open access” option for the article, but for some very strange reason PNAS does not allow free access to “early edition” papers, even if they’re open-access. Only after the articles are assigned to a specific volume, they do become freely available. So I think the blame is mostly on PNAS, not the authors.

        Of course, the authors could’ve also uploaded the preprint to arxiv, as far as I know PNAS allows that.

  3. ConanTheLibrarian says:
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    This highlights why government agencies – including NASA – need to pursue the NIH PubMed model. In that model, papers receiving Federal funding must be made publicly available in full-text 6 months following publication in a paid subscription journal. It continues to seed research while making the research available to the public who paid for the work. No college, corporation, association, research facility, or government agency will ever drop a subscription in order to be 6 months behind the field (or competitors, as the case may be) and receiving only a fraction of the papers published by the journals. This is under consideration at NASA, DOE, and a number of other government agencies. It also strikes a fair balance in that it does not require that the full-text version submitted to PubMed be the formatted copy printed in the journal – just that the content is the same,

    • cb450sc says:
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      And the vast majority of astronomy journals do make content older than one year publicly available. The crisis is actually more complicated than it appears. The truth is that few astronomers read the journals anymore for current research, mostly because the long lead times for publication and fast pace of the field usually mean that by the time something is in print it is obsolete. Most researchers I know get everything off “astro-ph”, i.e. http://xxx.lanl.gov/archive… . For at least ten years this has been the electronic form of the printed “preprints” we used to circulate. Only hitch is that astro-ph is not refereed, and the journals are. But I don’t know anyone who doesn’t put their papers on astro-ph. The journals are mostly now “the official record”. And has been noted, only they count for citation indices for hiring.

      • dogstar29 says:
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        Real peer review occurs only when all your peers actually read the paper and decide whether they believe it.

    • Mark_Flagler says:
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      I find PubMed incredibly valuable. No doubt I would find a PubNASA equally useful if it existed. Of course Rep. Wolf would want to block users with Chinese names…

      • ConanTheLibrarian says:
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        The closest currently is the NASA Technical Reports Server (http://ntrs.nasa.gov) which is good but, could be much better with the requirement that NASA funded research be submitted following publication. The same goes for the Department of Energy’s “SciTech Connect” database (http://www.osti.gov/scitech/).

        • dogstar29 says:
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          While I agree PubMed is extremely useful, you often hit a roadblock when you click on the “full-text” link and hit a page from Wiley or one of the other publishers asking for $30 to actually read the article. PubMed has no way to link the index to a PDF put legally on the net by the author. Google Scholar indexes these links when it can find them.

          • ConanTheLibrarian says:
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            When you hit that roadblock, read the record carefully because the “full-text” embargo may still be active (there should be a scheduled release date if this is the case). If there is no release date or a paper is beyond the 6-month embargo, then PubMed is pointing to a full-text source as a citation – not as “free” access.

          • Steve Whitfield says:
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            I think that six months from the announcement until being able to read the details is much too large a disconnect for data related to NASA programs. In the absence of formal labels, let me say that the “Research” publishing model doesn’t, in my opinion, apply to “Exploration” publishing.

            Public domain programs (NASA) don’t, by definition, have any intellectual property issues or revenues to protect, so delays serve no purpose. The only delays on NASA-sponsored data should be based on the time and money to actually do the preparation.

            We have seen endless complaints that NASA has failed time and again to present data to the public in an acceptable and timely manner; adding a pay-wall, or any unnecessary delays, kicks that argument in the shins.

  4. Todd Austin says:
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    It may be my university location, but I’m having no problem accessing the paper and the supporting data PDFs without a login.

  5. sunman42 says:
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    The finding agencies’ definition (admittedly the same used by many university departments in hiring and promotions) of “high impact” amounts to little more than snobbery: Nature and Science count, nothing else does – yet in fact the most cited papers in the field are in real journals such as The Astrophysical Journal. It, too, has a paywall, for one year after publication, as does Science.

    Most people employed in the field have access to the site licenses Keith mentions. The general public, who paid for the research, do not. The issue is how to pay for publication without subscription/site license fees. There are some open access journals, and many of those with paywalls charge “page charges” to help support the editorial and publication operations.

    The only ways out appear to be: direct government support of the journals (do we want that?), higher page charges, advertising revenue, and community contributions. Community support has never been adequate in the past, many authors from poorer countries still have issues with page charges, and aside from Science, which mainly serves to advertise its parent organization, Nature is the only journal (now journals) to make advertising work – by explicitly rejected papers they don’t think will result in enough eyes on enough advertising inches. That applies not only to papers that do not appear to be sufficiently “high impact,” but also to excellent papers in smaller fields.

    It looks to me as if indirect government support to federally funded researchers, in the form of higher page charges, is the only practical way out. Some publishers have already institutionalized that, with permanent paywalls unless the authors pay an exorbitant “open access” fee.

    OSTP has issued guidance to try to reduce the duration of paywalls to no more than a year, and less if possible: http://www.whitehouse.gov/s… . Got any better ideas?

    • dogstar29 says:
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      Access through the paywalls is not free. If you have it, someone is paying for it. With the vast number of journals nowadays its a rare institution indeed that has access to everything you need.

      • sunman42 says:
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        Exactly. And at those institutions that do have access, it’s paid for out of “taxes” on research grants in the form of overhead – so the taxpayer ends up paying for it.

  6. dogstar29 says:
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    The stated purpose of copyright law is to protect the right of the author of a creative work to profits derived from the sale of that work. The reality is that scientific authors, and even reviewers, are not even paid and must assign copyright to the journal, which prevents them from even making their findings available to readers who cannot pay. This turns original intent on its head. In the days when research was done on a shoestring and actually printing the magazine was the major expense, it had some justification. Today it has none.

    Thanks to the efforts of forward-thinking researchers, researchers funded by federal dollars finally have the right to put copies of their own research papers online. But the best solution is the one pioneered by PLoS, the Public Library of Science, with online-only journals like PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine, and the all-encompassing PLoS One, which are peer reviewed and edited but permit free and unrestricted access to all publications. With direct links from references to the original text, PLoS fulfills the original goal of the world wide web; allowing the reader to jump from one bit of knowledge to all the other bits of related knowledge in the world, to go instantly from question to answer. Obviously NASA should require any publisher of its work to make it immediately and fully available without charge or restriction.