Comment by achow
1 year ago
More details at Washington Univ' site: https://medicine.wustl.edu/news/neurons-help-flush-waste-out...
Could not find any free access to the paper, even though the Univ' says "This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH); the BJC Investigators Program at Washington University; and the Neuroscience Innovation Foundation."
These kind of grant funded research should be accessible at the least from the Univ' websites.
All NIH funded research is freely open access by law.
In this case it seems the authors didn’t pay the (crazy expensive) Nature open access fee. They will have to upload a free PDF to PubMed manually, but have up to a year to do so, and don’t seem to have done it yet.
Is Nature’s open access fee really that crazy? Last time I checked it was a few thousand dollars.
And it’s paid once, to make the whole thing open perpetually. It certainly seems better than having the people interested in reading it pay $30-40 each.
Of course, this is also based on the few times I’ve heard researchers talk about the ways they could spend their grant money. $2k to Nature sounds like a great deal by comparison.
Note: Worked for Nature in the past.
It’s over $12k, which seems insane, and is 5-10x what other journals charge.
These journals are a racket… volunteer editors, volunteer reviewers, and thousands for what amounts to PDF hosting… which they also charge every school and library in the world on the other end.
Yes, I wouldn't expect someone to pay a few thousand dollars to Nature when PubMed will do the same job for free. I think the role of academic journals is decreasing as open and tech-savvy solutions to information sharing and screening are being deployed.
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More discussion about this paper on ALZ forum:
https://www.alzforum.org/news/research-news/do-sleep-rhythms...
Checked and it was published through Nature:
Jiang-Xie, LF., Drieu, A., Bhasiin, K. et al. Neuronal dynamics direct cerebrospinal fluid perfusion and brain clearance. Nature 627, 157–164 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07108-6
Every Uni should have access through your library system.
I think the point was that every member of the public should have access to publicly funded research at least through the university's website, rather than at least everyone currently in universities should have access.
I agree but I also know (as a university employee) that the reason they don’t do this is because then they would have to pay for and manage the hosting of hundreds of thousands of articles. From the university’s perspective, managing and hosting articles is exactly what publishers do, so universities cede that work to publishers. What is needed is a public database of all publicly-funded research.
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I agree publicly funded research should not be siloed in anyway and should be in the public domain.
AaronSwartz+1*
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Yes, it was published through Nature.
But what stops Univ' site to have original research paper available for download? Nature magazine is just a distribution channel (they did not sponsor the research so should not have exclusive rights on it).
Left college long time ago; and do not have access to any library system.
Copyright Transfer Agreement. The moment you send the paper to Nature, you can only publish the draft you sent in. Unless you pay for publish, editorial costs are paid by selling access to that paper.
If you want to publish in an Open Access manner, you need to pay the costs. Or if your country wants to license it for Open Access, your country pays the costs.
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If you email the authors they might be happy to send you a copy - scientists tend to be in favour of the free exchange of information, there's no restriction on them sharing their paper if they choose to, and they don't get royalties from journal subscriptions so they have no vested interest in paywalling their research
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