For Academic Publishing, Princeton Goes Open Access By Default 101
First time accepted submitter crazyvas writes "Princeton University will prevent researchers from giving the copyright of scholarly articles to journal publishers (except if a waiver is requested). The new rule is part of an Open Access policy aimed at broadening the reach of their scholarly work and encouraging publishers to adjust standard contracts that commonly require exclusive copyright as a condition of publication. Universities pay millions of dollars a year for academic journal subscriptions. People without subscriptions are often prevented from reading taxpayer funded research. This is a bold first step in changing the face of how research (especially when taxpayer funded) works in the country, and a step towards weakening the current culture of charging increasingly exorbitant prices to view academic research publications."
Pay to read (Score:2)
I've never quite understood how paying to read other people's research encourages good science.
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I've never quite understood how paying to read other people's research encourages good science.
See, that's where your own research grant comes in - to pay for access to others research.
We may stand upon the shoulders of giants, but only with financial aid, which creates a considerable barrier.
Re:Pay to read (Score:5, Insightful)
and most importantly, paying not the author of the research, nor the institution that financed the author, but some random publisher who did virtually nothing.
The current publishing system really amazes me (and yes I'm an academic). This is wonderful news, I wish more institutions encouraged their researchers to go open access.
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Even more surprising is the absence of earlier versions of published articles that have been presented in conferences, distributed to peers, and the like. I keep expecting to find "working papers" versions of published articles on the websites of academics but rarely can find them. (I'm an ex-political-scientist, so my interests tend to that field or to related social sciences like economics. Perhaps it's different in the other sciences?)
sadly.... (Score:2)
Even more surprising is the absence of earlier versions of published articles that have been presented in conferences, distributed to peers, and the like. I keep expecting to find "working papers" versions of published articles on the websites of academics but rarely can find them. (I'm an ex-political-scientist, so my interests tend to that field or to related social sciences like economics. Perhaps it's different in the other sciences?)
It is not :/
The academic web sphere is littered with broken links, links to defunct research projects, themselves also littered with broken links to previous publications at best (and at worst, with no mention of any prior work at all.) In general (purely personal observation of mine), many academic researchers don't give a rat's ass when it comes to making their older research accessible to the masses. The focus is entirely on what they work on right now and on their current funding.
Sad indeed becaus
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I got an email a little while ago saying that it was now a requirement for any papers written on EPSRC grants, meaning most science and engineering papers from UK universities. It always seemed to be more of a problem with individuals than institutions though. Pretty much all journals allow you to put the preprint (same content, just without the journal's formatting) online on your own web site, so it doesn't matter if the journal is open access or not as long as you bother to put the PDF on your web site. For some strange reason, a lot of academics - whose reputation is based largely on how many people read and cite their papers - choose not to do this simple step.
They don't know how to put a PDF file on a server and make a link to it. Seriously, I'm not kidding. This is understandable from non-tech academics, but for CS/CE/EE, this is no exaggeration :/
Obviously, there should be a department web master and a department server and web page in which department research is published. But at the very least, one would expect academics (specially in technical fields) to maintain their university home pages with their current and past research for posterity.
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"but some random publisher who did virtually nothing"
If they provide nothing, then why do researchers use them?
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You're mistakenly conflating "do nothing" with "provide nothing".
The "random publisher" does nothing, true, except publish, and in this age, anyone can publish.
What the "random publisher" provides is prestige.
Self-publication is for nobodies. Anyone who's anyone wants that prestigious imprint to put onto their CV. If that means that none of the unwashed masses can actually read and question the research, all the better.
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I think this is overly cynical. Publishers also handle the peer review process (lining up the reviewers, managing the reviews, etc.), which is hard for just anyone to do. Sure, anyone can publish, but what is the value is doing all that work and putting together a paper if nobody will see it? Do you want to write a thoughtful editorial on foreign policy and have it published in the weekly Penny Saver, or in the Sunday New York Times? Effectively disseminating ideas is not as easy as putting it up on a w
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Publishers do none of the work you speak of. Lining up the reviewers and managing the reviews is done by editors, who are all senior scientist volunteers! Again this is driven by prestige.
They do, however, help the review process along by providing web resources for reviewers to use, and they do in fine handle the typesetting of the articles, and the printing, distribution and such.
One of my fairly senior colleague complained recently that as he is advancing in his career, he is asked and expected to provid
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I don't see prestige as necessarily a bad thing because it is the community that defines what is prestigious. I think things like Open Access will make it easier, and perhaps more desirable, to publish elsewhere and still have your paper seen by your colleagues. I think the idea of everyone as their own publisher won't work in general because there is already a ton of places where you can go to find all sorts of interesting (some would say "crackpot") papers. The journal does some sort of quality cut for
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Or in short, is there some benefit that the traditional outlets bring to the table that'll be lost here? I'm just curious. Because on the surface of it all, I can't see why anyone wouldn't prefer this, as
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thanks Princeton! (Score:2)
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Researchers are pretty good about sharing their work through alternative channels. Most researchers will host PDFs of their work on their department web page. If not, email them and ask. I've never had a request for a PDF denied after contacting the author.
Sure, it's not legal for them to do this. They usually have signed their copyright over to the journal. But no one enforces it, and if they tried the movement towards open access journals would be greatly accelerated.
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At least with the journals I've submitted to, it is perfectly legal for them to give out copies of the PDF or post them for free on department websites. Although you give copyright of the final article to the journal, the copyright agreements usually have details saying you are free to post it elsewhere as long as you don't incorporate any of the editing or formatting done by the editors to put the article into its final form.
Yes. Part of the deal usually involves the author being given 50 to 200 reprints of an accepted article just as it will be published. Each reprint comes with nice glossy covers showing the full reference to the article (author, title, journal, date, volume, issue, page range, etc.) in a decent sized font. At least, that's what I always got, but it's a few years since I submitted stuff to journals; mostly, I just publish at conferences nowadays. Whether a journal article or a conference paper, if anyone ask
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Sure, it's not legal for them to do this
What kind of crappy journal are you publishing in? Almost every one I've even considered submitting a paper to explicitly allows you to place a copy of the preprint on your web page. It's a pretty standard clause in the copyright assignment for any reputable journal. The only exception I've encountered was a journal that asks you to link to their (publicly available) hosted copy of the paper so that they could see how many people were reading it.
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Researchers are pretty good about sharing their work through alternative channels. Most researchers will host PDFs of their work on their department web page. If not, email them and ask. I've never had a request for a PDF denied after contacting the author.
I've had a researcher send me an encrypted PDF which I thought was a pretty weird thing to do. It was weak encryption so no biggie. Still, pretty odd.
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I'm currently applying for grad schools - and nothing is more frustrating than finding all of a professor's research "hidden" behind pay-journals... what a step in the right direction.
Trinity College Dublin (my institution) also does this in a way. We are obliged to send anything we publish to the college's open access server. A lot of institutions and funding bodies have similar policies or are putting them in place.
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I'm in private research, so I'm completely screwed when it comes to such things; at least at school you'll have access to some. But yes, Thanks Princeton!
It's not a first step (Score:5, Informative)
Previous to that there were paper preprints mailed out for decades and decades.
Now other fields have indeed have a harder time getting out from under the thumb of the publishing houses and will indeed need the kick in the rear that Princeton is giving.
That doesn't mean that refereed journals are going away - just that they are not the bleeding edge anymore, I would argue they never were.
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I completely agree. Scientific publication is an immense racket at present. We pay to submit our articles, review other scientist’s articles for free, and then still get charged to access our own publications and are forbidden from posting them where they're publicly available.
Unfortunately, I think it will still take another generation to "get out from under the thumb of the publishing houses" and move to an open-access model.
The prestige of a publication in Science or Nature is an immense boos
Re:It's not a first step (Score:4, Insightful)
That's why what Princeton is doing is such a great thing. It allows you to still submit and be published in a prestigious journal, but hide behind the university's legal team when it comes to posting your publication where everyone can access it. Google scholar does an amazing job of finding publicly available copies of scientific publications on a researcher's personal website, etc, so this is a big step towards open-access scientific publication without having to sacrifice your career.
Depends if the journals will accept this. It would be no great loss to any journal in particular to not accept work from Princeton - it may only (in the short term) harm their own researchers if other universities don't follow (though I see from the summary there is a waiver - will be interesting to see how that works out).
Although I'm in favour of open access I get a bit pissed off with Universities dictating publication policy like this. I got my own grant money so it should be between me and my funders how I spend it (and how I assign my own copyright).
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It would be no great loss to any journal in particular to not accept work from Princeton.
It would be very dangerous for any journal to have to acknowledge publicly that they refuse publication based on the institution of the authors, because they must (at least appear to) be fair and objective. They will most likely add another item on the copyright form, to the effect that: "If you belong to institutions A, B or C you do not have to turn over copyright to us".
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I got my own grant money so it should be between me and my funders how I spend it (and how I assign my own copyright).
If your grant money is funded, in whole or in part, by the taxpayer then the taxpayer has a right to the fruits of the money he has spent on your research.
If it's a privately funded grant, then by all means do as you wish.
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I got my own grant money so it should be between me and my funders how I spend it (and how I assign my own copyright).
If your grant money is funded, in whole or in part, by the taxpayer then the taxpayer has a right to the fruits of the money he has spent on your research.
If it's a privately funded grant, then by all means do as you wish.
I don't quite agree - there's a subtle but important distinction between being employed by the taxpayer and being grant funded by the taxpayer. An employee is being asked by the taxpayer to do something specific that they are interested in, and the government retains control of the direction of the work and the ownership of the results. A grant funded scientist is being enabled by the taxpayer to do work that they (both parties) think is important (it's a charitable donation in a sense) - much like grant
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The prestige of a publication in Science or Nature is an immense boost to your career. What journal your research gets published in is a very decisive factor in getting a tenure-track position and in getting tenure.
Clearly, this is true, but the question is "why?" What is it about a particular journal that provides it's published authors with such a career boost? Is it a superior review process that reliably selects only the cream for publication? Is it "cultural inertia", a status made up largely from a bygone era when "publishing" meant distributing the work of others printed on dead trees? In either case, Princeton's move is a good step, but let's consider the authors. Distribution is no longer a challenge, so what
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The first internet-age era step was (at least in physics publishing) 20 years ago: the LANL Preprint Archive, later known as xxx.lanl.gov, now www.arxiv.org
This was one of two famous sites largely implemented by a single person. The other one is the Internet Movie Database. The person responsible for both is now a sheep farmer and has no Internet connection...
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Bad summary (Score:3)
This of course applies only to grants that were awarded starting a couple years ago. However renewed grants are subject to this as well, and of course any new grants are automatically subject to this.
Hence contrary to the summary,
People without subscriptions are often prevented from reading taxpayer funded research
Is true for very little current research.
Research funded by the several states (Score:2)
Hence contrary to the summary,
People without subscriptions are often prevented from reading taxpayer funded research
Is true for very little current research.
You make a good point for federally funded research. What about research funded by the several states?
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">People without subscriptions are often prevented from reading taxpayer funded research
Is true for very little current research."
You are incorrect. Maybe for certain fields that might be true, but when I browse journals from home >90% of them are not accessible without paying. The only reason it is the other way around at work is that I work at a university and we subscribe. For the general public the majority of research is still trapped behind paywalls. Some journals are eventually open access
Most taxpayer-funded research still held 4 ransom (Score:1)
You're correct that NIH requires that articles be freely available. But there's a one-year lag, which is completely unjustified. Why shouldn't the people, who paid for it, get access right away? The journal didn't pay to do the research, so keeping it from the people who DID pay for it is absurd. But the one-year lag, while unjustifiable, is better than we had before and better than many other places, so for the moment I'll give it a pass.
More importantly right now, most US government research is NOT fr
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People without subscriptions are often prevented from reading taxpayer funded research
Is true for very little current research.
You're simply wrong about this. True the NIH requires submission to open access journals, and I trust you know what your talking about with the NSF. But these are not the only tax-based sources of research funding. First, there are non-U.S. sources. Even in the U.S. there are the departments of defense, education, and energy which fund huge amounts of research. Defense and energy do a lot in science and technology. On top of that you have state universities that are funded (less and less) by tax dolla
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People without subscriptions are often prevented from reading taxpayer funded research
Is true for very little current research.
You're simply wrong about this. True the NIH requires submission to open access journals
The NIH is the largest single funding source for scientific research from the US government.
there are non-U.S. sources
If the money comes from outside the US then how is it taxpayer funded?
Even in the U.S. there are the departments of defense, education, and energy which fund huge amounts of research
And they will likely end up following the NIH lead on the matter. It may take some time, but they will most likely go the same way. Regardless, the total research budget for ED and DoE is small in comparison to the NIH. Department of Defense is a different animal altogether, and often does research that doesn't end in publication anyways.
On top of that you have state universities that are funded (less and less) by tax dollars from their states. They often support the research of their faculty with that money
Whi
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Obviously, there are taxpayers outside the USA. They pay taxes for other countries, as well.
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NIH is probably the exception. I think as of yet, most DARPA and NSF grants don't require open access. If they do, they must not enforce it because most people I know get their funding from them and not one of their papers is open access.
Definitely good news (Score:3)
I've had to sign over the copyright for each of the papers I've published. Fortunately, I'm usually allowed to disseminate my work for educational purposes, so I can post my papers on my personal webpage. However, there are plenty of publications that do not allow this and you've got to fork over the big bucks just to read a single article. While my university has the resources to maintain subscriptions to all the big journals and conference proceedings in my field, plenty of others aren't so lucky.
If other schools follow Princeton, this will certainly level the playing field. Maybe it will get more people interested in research since they won't have to be associated with a major university to read the state of the art.
Harvard (Score:2)
From the fine article, it looks like Harvard [eprints.org] is already among those supporting Open Access. So it's not just Princeton. I think there are quite a few others now. It's time for a list to be made, to show which universities are the leaders.
However, open access may be going more discipline by discipline rather than institution by institution. Arxiv and PLoS have been big for years for certain fields.
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Excellent (Score:5, Insightful)
Researchers and peer reviewers are not paid for their work but academic publishers have said such a business model is required to maintain quality.
The publishers are lying here to protect their cash cow. What maintains quality is the peer review system (which the journals do not pay for). The transfer of copyright to the publisher allows them to hold Universities to ransom - universities cannot function without access to the literature (present and past), and the costs of online access to journals have been spiraling over the past few years at a time when the publishers' actual costs are going down. After all, they don't pay for the research to be carried out, nor do they pay the academic editors or the reviewers, nor do they even need to typeset the document now that everyone submits a machine-readable copy.
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What maintains quality is the peer review system (which the journals do not pay for).
Very much definitely this. And what is strange is that reviewers give their time freely (although I have been offered payment a few times, it is pretty unusual). It is pretty obvious that if academics find themselves unable to distribute their work fairly then publishers might find it increasingly hard to find people to review submissions.
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Excellent news (Score:3)
For all we know, Princeton may have studied the Wasabi Fire Alarm, years before that chap who got the igNoble for it.
This is really good stuff (Score:4, Informative)
Private academic publishers do extremely little for the exclusive copyright that they demand. Academics write the papers. Other academics peer-review them. Academics volunteer as editors and publicists. In most cases, none of these people are paid by the publisher for their work.
Increasingly, academic publications are digital only, meaning that literally the only service being provided by the publishers is to put the papers on a web site, behind a paywall.
Many academics that I know engage in "civil disobediance" and post their papers publicly anyway. Some publishers (notably the ACM) actually permit this. But most do not.
Princeton on its own won't be enough to change the system, but hopefully a few other big names will follow, and tip the balance.
Re:This is really good stuff (but most MS ain't) (Score:1)
Right, because every scientific paper, written up in Microsoft Word, w/ inconsistent formatting and font usage, never edited or corrected by anyone but the author, and low-res RGB graphics is instantly and automatically ready to print on a printing press, or to convert to a nice ePub which will re-flow and be readable.
Also, no publisher has ever even considered something like ``The Article of the Future'' --- http://www.articleofthefuture.com/ [articleofthefuture.com]
While there are exceptions (arxiv.org comes to mind), for the mos
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Right, because every scientific paper, written up in Microsoft Word, w/ inconsistent formatting and font usage, never edited or corrected by anyone but the author, and low-res RGB graphics is instantly and automatically ready to print on a printing press, or to convert to a nice ePub which will re-flow and be readable.
Also, no publisher has ever even considered something like ``The Article of the Future'' --- http://www.articleofthefuture.com/ [articleofthefuture.com]
While there are exceptions (arxiv.org comes to mind), for the most part, raw author manuscripts are _not_ pleasant to read or work w/.
Fair point, but I'm guessing that authors who provide well formatted papers to a journal don't get discounts...
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You wrote:
>Fair point, but I'm guessing that authors who provide well formatted papers to a journal don't get discounts...
No, but authors who create nice, clean manuscripts get invited to write follow-on papers more frequently.
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I'm a Princeton graduate student (and somewhat shocked I got this news via slashdot.) My scientific papers are in LaTeX, properly formatted using custom journal templates, use high quality vector graphics, and are well edited and corrected.
Thanks.
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Big name publishers may be essential for great _looking_ articles.
A great article, though is usually not a matter of beauty.
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I don't know what proportion of publishers does what, but the matter of fact is that many journals that matter allow self-archiving of preprints, and even of the revised version that is essentially identical with the version that goes into print, perhaps up to special fonts.They do not want the final publisher pdf to be public, though, (here [sherpa.ac.uk]
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I think that a condition of government funding should be:
1. All research results are in the public domain and discoveries cannot be patented.
2. Researchers are required to publish all results (positive and negative) within n days of discovery. This includes sequences, coordinates, raw data, you name it.
3. Researchers must place their publications in the public domain.
4. Fail to do any of the above, and you go on the government funding blacklist for n years for the first offense, and permanently for sub
About time (Score:3)
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Great! (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone working in academia who knows the journal business well and is also a frequent anonymous peer-reviewer for an A-tier journal, I wholeheartedly welcome this decision. The publishers earn insane amounts of money for journals, yet practically all the work is done by unpaid volunteers. It's like a money milking machine and tremendously hinders research -- especially in poorer countries, because research institutions very often cannot pay for all subscriptions and have to make tough choices. At my working place in a not so rich country we cannot get access to many important journals and I frequently have to ask colleagues to send me some manuscript (which is embarasing, to say the least).
Before someone starts ranting about high-risk business, low volumes, they don't really make money etc. let me assure you that the majority of journals require authors to typeset the manuscript themselves, practically never pay for linguistic editing and do no editing in addition to what the voluntary peer-reviewers suggest to the author, and the rest of the typesetting is done as cheaply as possible (e.g. Springer commonly outsources to India -- fine for me, I like Indians and their country). Basically, the publishers do nothing - no proof reading, sometimes they don't even run a spell-checker, and make shitloads of money. One journal article USD $35 -- you get the picture!
Wrongly assigned credit (Score:2)
This is a bold first step in changing the face of how research (especially when taxpayer funded) works in the country, and a step towards weakening the current culture of charging increasingly exorbitant prices to view academic research publications.
However for some time now all work funded by new and renewed grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are required to be published in publicly accessible journals [nih.gov]. It has been this way now for over two years, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) has implemented a similar policy for work they fund.
So while it is nice to see Princeton, as an academic institution, take a similar stance, it is mostly redundant as the vast majority of taxpayer-funded research - at least th
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What they said... (Score:1)
Pre 1923 JSTOR journals (Score:1)
http://www.torrents.net/torrent/1602488/JSTOR_01_PhilTrans/
Sounds expensive (Score:2)
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~$ pdflatex article.tex: a few micro-cents of CPU time.
Where are you getting the extra $1450?
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Mostly the salary of staff who still have to manage the review process (the secretaries, the general editor, etc), people who manage the journal issues, the typesetters, the webmasters, etc, plus bills and incidentals. It adds up quickly.
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Keep that crap under lock and key! (Score:2)
Frankly speaking, the quality of published papers out of academia is just awful. It is better to keep most of that badly written make-work grad student drivel out of search results for those of us with actual work to do. Our academic system has become so overrun with the need to simply output ever increasing amounts of paper, paper that NOBODY will ever read, and that NOBODY should even try to read.
The university system is sick, and stuck in the past. At least keep all these crap papers and crap thesis'
Princeton University Press (Score:2)
Publishing isn't cheap (Score:1)
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We now are in a situation where we have to pay both library subscriptions and publication fees, but hopefully more and more journals will become free access, and so library subscription fees will become lower. Meanwhile having to pay for publication will probably even out the two costs, with the added benefit that researchers will now think twice about sending a paper for publication for the mere sake of it. Less drivel, more content (one can hope).
Also, for the most part papers are based on PhDs work. An a
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That's primarily because everyone who is a part of the process feels they should still be making the same inflated amounts for each part of the process. Everyone has to get their cut, and they are used to getting a certain cut and feel entitled to it.
You know what doesn't cost much? Getting a domain, some hosting, and publishing it yourself online. Groups of researchers could easily form peer-reviewing groups, which is the only meaningful benefit the journals grant (I didn't say helpful to your career...I s
Government Sponsor == Public Domain (Score:1)
How do they enforce this? (Score:2)
Harvard & MIT took steps earlier. (Score:1)