Galaxy Zoo Talk

Why must zooites who created the GZ data *pay* to access the key paper on it?

  • JeanTate by JeanTate

    Zooniverse Published Papers -> Galaxy Zoo 1: data release of morphological classifications for nearly 900 000 galaxies, Lintott+ 2011. Available here -> Full Refereed Journal Article (PDF/Postscript) (if you choose "Electronic Refereed Journal Article (HTML)" instead, you end up on the same page):

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    Like the overwhelming majority of zooites, no doubt, I am not an "Oxford Journals Subscriber [or] Registrant", not an "OpenAthens User", not a member of an "Institution" which enables me to gain free access.

    So it seems that the only option I have, if I wish to read the actual, published paper, is to pay US$25.00, which will give me access to the paper, "for 1 day"

    Why?

    Even more curious is the fact that, in a panel on the right, is a box with this text:

    This journal is fully compliant with the RCUK Open Access
    Policy For more information click here

    Clicking "here" brings up a series of webpages, with great walls of text; perhaps the answer to "Why do zooites need to pay US$25.00 to get just 1 day's access to that key paper?" is somewhere among that text. If it is, I can't see it.

    Posted

  • ElisabethB by ElisabethB moderator

    This is what zooite Eigenstate replied to the above question over on the Forum

    Greetings,

    You are required to pay for the same reasons that even the authors
    listed on the paper itself are required to pay--either on a per view
    basis or for an annual subscription. Also note that the vast majority
    of journals have page charges billed to the authors or their
    institutions and generally paid from grant funds. Those are the
    mechanism by which the journals survive. Publication of such material
    is an expensive endeavor.

    There are of course the options to go to a good library that has a
    subscription to the journals of interest, or to formally request a
    reprint from the authors which is how it was done in pre-computer
    days. Another somewhat devious alternative is to beg a colleague who
    does have access to make and send you a copy.

    Best regards, ES

    Posted

  • JeanTate by JeanTate in response to ElisabethB's comment.

    Thanks Els.

    And here's what I found, when I did some further digging (I just posted this in the GZ forum thread):

    I did some more digging, and it seems that MNRAS - the peer-reviewed journal in which the key Galaxy Zoo paper was published - has an option it calls Open Access:

    Authors may optionally choose to publish their paper under the Oxford
    Open scheme. This author-pays open access service makes papers freely
    available to everyone, online and immediately upon publication, for a
    fee.

    Given that this option exists, why did the GZ Science Team authors not choose it?

    I'll look into other Galaxy Zoo Publications, posted on the Zooniverse Published Papers webpage, to see how many are similarly behind a pay-wall, and how many are Open Access.

    I wonder what the Galaxy Zoo Science Team plans for future papers; will they make the effort to make them Open Access? Particularly pertinent given that the key Galaxy Zoo 2 paper is now with "the referee"

    ETA: zkChris said this, in a comment on his latest blog post:

    I’m not sure what you mean about Zooniverse publications thought, as
    they all should be available for free, to everyone, via the arxiv. The
    paper you mention is linked here, for example.

    While that may be true - I'm still checking it out - it would seem that the Zooniverse Published Papers page makes it unnecessarily time consuming, and difficult, for ordinary zooites to get copies of such papers.

    Posted

  • JeanTate by JeanTate

    Edd wrote a couple of good posts, in the GZ forum thread Why must zooites who created the GZ data pay to access the key paper on it?. He noted that the Galaxy Zoo Published Papers page is quite different from the Zooniverse Published Papers one! Strangely, the former lists only 25 GZ papers, while the latter 36 (in addition to 17 others associated with other Zooniverse Projects).

    In the GZ forum thread I posted a breakdown of the 25, by which are behind a paywall and which aren't (and which have astro-ph links that may - or may not! - lead to a PDF document that is the same as what's behind the paywall).

    There's but one link per paper, in the Zooniverse Published Papers page; it says simply "Available here".
    Here's my analysis of the Galaxy Zoo Zooniverse Published Papers.

    First, each of the 36 links takes you to an ADS (The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System) entry.

    Second, the extra 11 papers are:

    Galaxy Zoo Morphology and Photometric Redshifts in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Way 2011 NOT behind paywall! Yay!

    Galaxy Zoo: A Catalog of Overlapping Galaxy Pairs for Dust Studies, Keel+ 2013 ("in press")

    Galaxy Zoo: Motivations of Citizen Scientists, Raddick+ 2013 ("in press")

    Galaxy Zoo: Bulgeless Galaxies With Growing Black Holes, Simmons+ 2012 ("in press", "Accepted version has further ...")

    The different star-formation histories of blue and red spiral and elliptical galaxies, Tojeiro+ 2013 (behind paywall; "To be published in ..." but it's actually already published)

    Galaxy Zoo: quantifying morphological indicators of galaxy interaction, Casteels+ 2013 (behind paywall, "Accepted to ..." but already published)

    Galaxy Zoo and ALFALFA: atomic gas and the regulation of star formation in barred disc galaxies, Masters+ 2012 (behind paywall)

    The Galaxy Zoo survey for giant AGN-ionized clouds: past and present black hole accretion events, Keel+ 2012 (behind paywall)

    Galaxy Zoo: building the low-mass end of the red sequence with local post-starburst galaxies, Wong+ 2013 (behind paywall)

    Chandra Observations of Galaxy Zoo Mergers: Frequency of Binary Active Nuclei in Massive Mergers, Teng+ 2012 (behind paywall)

    Polar ring galaxies in the Galaxy Zoo, Finkelman+ 2012 (behind paywall)

    Galaxy Zoo Volunteers Share Pain and Glory of Research, Clery 2011 (behind paywall) NO PREPRINT/arXiv document!

    OK, that's TWELVE; the one that's in the Galaxy Zoo Published Papers page, but not the Zooniverse one is:

    Schawinski K., et al., 2010, "The Sudden Death of the Nearest Quasar", ApJ 724, 30

    Posted

  • vrooje by vrooje admin, scientist

    Hi Jean,

    The extra 11 are all relatively recent, and the difference between the GZ papers page and the GZ-only list on the Zooniverse publications page is mainly that the latter has been updated much more recently.

    The MNRAS Open Access option is useful in that it removes the paywall immediately (with no embargo/proprietary period), but the fee the authors pay to remove the paywall is quite substantial, and given that one can just post the paper on the arXiv, it often seems unnecessary.

    In the arXiv, the comments will usually show the name of the publication and its stage of publication. So, e.g., "ApJ published version" means the latest version arXiv is the accepted version of the paper as it appears in the Astrophysical Journal. But there are many variations on this. A quick guide to deciphering the information in the comments section of the arXiv:

    • submitted - this version has been submitted to the journal but probably not integrated any referee's comments yet, so future (published) versions may be anywhere from slightly to very different.

    • re-submitted - this version has been modified to incorporate at least 1 round of comments from the referee, but hasn't been accepted yet, so the published version may vary by some unspecified amount.

    • accepted - the referee has recommended the paper be accepted and the journal has taken their advice, so the scientific substance of the paper is all in this version. Note: "accepted" versions may not have gone through the proofs stage, so there may be small variations between this and the published version, but the scientific content is very unlikely to change.

    • in press - this usually means the paper has also gone through the proofs stage for minor editing. As there are no more changes after the proofs stage, this is the version that is as close to the published version as the authors can get without it having actually been assigned an issue & page number yet.

    • to appear in - a bit vague, could either be accepted or in press.

    • published - in my experience this is nearly identical to "in press".

    Note, though, that the comments section in arXiv is free-format, so the authors can write whatever they like and don't necessarily have to follow these conventions. Also, sometimes there are additional comments meant to be helpful, like number of pages. In the Simmons et al. mentioned above, for example, I included paper length, number of figures, status (in press for version 2) and a sentence describing how the paper changed between the submitted version and the accepted version.

    Note #2: all the above describes papers at some stage of submission to refereed journals. Not everything on arXiv is refereed, and if it's not mentioned in the comments it's usually best to assume it's not associated with any journal.

    Posted

  • JeanTate by JeanTate in response to vrooje's comment.

    Thanks very much vrooje! 😃

    As I noted above, I also started a thread in the GZ forum: Why must zooites who created the GZ data pay to access the key paper on it?. Since posting here, I posted further there. Including a summary of what I found on looking into the 51 (actually only 50) SPACE Zooniverse Published Papers. And Edd posted there too.

    Your additional comments are indeed very helpful, thanks for adding them. One question though, does "Accepted version has further discussion of violent non-merger processes + additional comparison with previous work" refer to v2, or to an edited (but not posted on astro-ph) version of v2?

    Posted

  • vrooje by vrooje admin, scientist

    In that case I think I was bounded by a character limit so the statement may not have been as clear as I'd have liked, but the "accepted version" I'm referring to is v2. That version is only different from the printed version by a few commas and font changes, as far as I recall.

    There has been some talk, by the way, about making some changes to the publications list, including linking directly to arXiv versions instead of relying on people to recognize that the ADS page does also link to arXiv and make them click all the way through that. Stay tuned 😃

    Posted

  • JeanTate by JeanTate in response to vrooje's comment.

    Thanks! 😉

    I've updated my summary accordingly.

    I hope that an even sooner change will be the addition of a para or two explaining - to ordinary zooites - why so many published papers are behind paywalls, that the latest preprint version is free, and that the various Zooniverse project Science Team members who are the lead authors have gone the extra mile to make sure that the preprint/arXiv version is as close to the published one as possible. A short guide such as that in your earlier post would round out such an introduction nicely!

    Oh, and that published papers which are NOT available to ordinary zooites in any form (except by payment of $$/€€/etc) be either removed or be clearly branded as such.

    Posted

  • JeanTate by JeanTate

    Here's what I just wrote, as a comment in the Zooniverse blog entry "Putting the ‘citizen’ in ‘citizen science’", in reply to zkChris' comment.:

    Why must PH zooites pay to access the papers that depend on their clicks? (Planet Hunters Talk), this Galaxy Zoo Talk discussion, and Why must zooites who created the GZ data pay to access the key paper on it? (Galaxy Zoo forum)
    are threads/discussions in three Zooniverse project fora that I started, to get discussion going on this topic.

    Perhaps the most eye-opening thing, for me, was the In The Dark blog post Desperate Publishers. This blog is by UK cosmologist Peter Coles, and from it (and my own research) I have learned that the accessibility of scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals is a hot topic in academia. A very hot topic. Of course, in my past life as a Universe Today staff writer, I was not completely unaware of this, but I had not looked into it in any depth.

    Anyway, my summary of the 50 SPACE Zooniverse "Published Papers" shows that 17 are available in electronic form, as they appear in the relevant journals. A freely available version of another 22 or so likely match quite closely what has been published, though the actual published papers are behind a 'paywall'. Four were not, in fact, published at the time I did my research, and for three more it's not clear how the freely available preprint version differs from that which was actually published.

    However, two Zooniverse Published Papers are NOT available to ordinary zooites, not even as a preprint, unless they are willing to pay!

    For those who haven't already seen it, this post by zookeeperChris, in the PH Talk thread is both recent and very pertinent.

    Posted

  • JeanTate by JeanTate

    For an update, check out yesterday's - self-explanatory - Zooniverse blog post by zkChris: (Many) Zooniverse Papers Now Open Access.

    Posted