European Science Funders Ban Grantees From Publishing In Paywalled Journals (sciencemag.org) 123
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: Frustrated with the slow transition toward open access (OA) in scientific publishing, 11 national funding organizations in Europe turned up the pressure today. As of 2020, the group, which jointly spends about $8.8 billion on research annually, will require every paper it funds to be freely available from the moment of publication. In a statement, the group said it will no longer allow the 6- or 12-month delays that many subscription journals now require before a paper is made OA, and it won't allow publication in so-called hybrid journals, which charge subscriptions but also make individual papers OA for an extra fee. The move means grantees from these 11 funders -- which include the national funding agencies in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and France as well as Italy's National Institute for Nuclear Physics -- will have to forgo publishing in thousands of journals, including high-profile ones such as Nature, Science, Cell, and The Lancet, unless those journals change their business model. Not everyone is pleased by the decision. A spokesperson for Springer Nature, which publishes more than 3,000 journals, said the plan "potentially undermines the whole research publishing system." A spokesperson for AAAS, Science's publisher, added: "Implementing such a plan, in our view, would disrupt scholarly communications, be a disservice to researchers, and impinge academic freedom."
As an American.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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[As an American....] ...there's times I really love Europe.
LOL, agreed as another American.
I will say, however much or often I might disagree with many European's political and cultural views, I have no problem stating that I stand with them on this. These scientific pay-walled journals are simply old distribution channels seeking to halt the advance of technology in information distribution to preserve an outdated business model just as the **AAs are attempting in the US.
I may often disagree with Europeans (and others as well), but I have no personal antipathy tow
Gov Meddling (Score:1, Troll)
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That's literally how predatory form of venture capitalism works. How on earth did you get from that to public funding, which is polar opposite of that in almost every conceivable way?
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So, just to understand, do you have some problem with (a) People giving free money to scientists attaching strings to that money, (b) Those strings being to make information more freely available, with all the obvious societal (and capitalistic) benefits, or (c) The decrease in power/prestige of paid journals, leading to tenure track academics not have to sell off their rights for nothing to avoid the "perish" option.
the voice from Springer (Score:5, Insightful)
uh, that would be the point...
Re:the voice from Springer (Score:5, Insightful)
"potentially undermines the whole research publishing system"
Translating that from weasel to English, what they mean is 'it undermines our sweet, sweet profit machine built on the backs of the taxpayers."
There's plenty wrong with the publishing system, from the publish or perish madness to walling off publicly funded research so that the public cannot access what they paid for. Good on the EU for taking steps to remove needless barriers. And for American research, there's still Sci-Hub.
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Everyone time this gets posted, people act as though it hasn't been NIH policy for YEARS that every NIH-funded paper (so, essentially every important paper in the US) is open access within 6 months of publication.
YEARS.
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"Everyone time this gets posted, people act as though it hasn't been NIH policy for YEARS that every NIH-funded paper (so, essentially every important paper in the US) is open access within 6 months of publication.
YEARS."
Yes, thats also been true for most of Europe for YEARS. As I am sure you saw, when you read the annoucement, this is quite different. Specifically, it says that six month embargos are not okay, that hybrid journals are not okay and that article charges will be capped.
So this is quite a diff
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The biggest for-(largely unearned)-profit scientific publishers are European. So this is interesting news.
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Everyone time this gets posted, people act as though it hasn't been NIH policy for YEARS that every NIH-funded paper (so, essentially every important paper in the US) is open access within 6 months of publication. YEARS.
This is indeed an improvement / extension of that policy. The point is that the NIH policy allowed journals to remain closed while allowing a subset of papers to be open access (i.e. hybrid style). Since a lot of papers were still not open access, universities still needed a subscription, so their business model remained intact (and was even improved as they now get open access charges as well as subscriptions).
You can run a journal for about 500$ per article (archiving, copy-editing, type-setting. etc), ma
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Undermining the publishing system is GOOD (Score:2)
"potentially undermines the whole research publishing system."
That's the point you parasite!
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As usual, Germany lags behind. It is almost as if Germany wants to stay in the past in all things.
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As usual, Germany lags behind. It is almost as if Germany wants to stay in the past in all things.
Maybe Springer Nature being majority German-owned has something to do with it.
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now all we need (Score:3)
Now all we need is for the granting agencies to ban the use of student labor outside of training grants. Let's clean up that accounting sinkhole and maybe we can start creating some career paths for professional scientists that don't assume a cold-war economy.
Peer review with paywalls breeds corruption (Score:5, Interesting)
The World Wide Web as we know it today was created by researchers to combat the broken and corrupt publication process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Berners-Lee worked as an independent contractor at CERN from June to December 1980. While in Geneva, he proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers.[27] To demonstrate it, he built a prototype system named ENQUIRE.[28]
The fact that any pay-to-read peer-review journals still exist today is a testament to the holding power of corrupt institutions.
Please understand, the peer review journal publication system is only part of the problem, and probably a small part. The tenure system and "publish or perish" culture of research institutions is another major part of the problem.
So much of what is published in peer reviewed journals is absolute shit. Big words, pretty graphs, drivel so esoteric that few attempts to reproduce are ever made.
I can't find an online reference at the moment, so I'll just re-tell the story briefly:
In 1987 Dr. Paul Chu and associates discover the first high-temperature superconductor that worked above the boiling temperature of liquid nitrogen, 77K. This was the holy grail of material science, and a big deal. If the results were simply published, the months long peer review process would have introduced too many chances for someone to steal their research and publish first. Peer reviewers often paid, under the table of course, to be peer reviewers - this way they could see what was going on in their field before anyone else. And this is exactly what happened.
Chu submitted a paper for publication on the discovery of the first high temperature superconductor, knowing full and well that the peer review process would take a few months and in that time someone would likely try to take credit for his discovery. He also knew that minor typographical corrections could be submitted as little as a few days before the publication date. So, his originally submitted paper claimed to have discovered YbCuO, was this magical unicorn of high Tc. And sure enough, about a month later an Italian journal published a paper claiming to have discovered high Tc superconductivity in YbCuO. The graphs and data looked strangely familiar.
Chu was no idiot, so he actually made the 'wrong' superconductor and verified that it did not work. So, months later, and right before the publication date, he submitted a minor correction to change 'Yb', ytterbium, to just 'Y', yttrium.
The journal was caught red handed. They had employed a peer reviewer who stole data, but there was little they could do. The 'corrected' publication was submitted. And Paul Chu faced some difficulties in getting that journal to accept any more of his publications. End story.
Publishing a paper on a server that records the date and the MD5SUM of the file should be all it takes. Instead of peer review, a measure of value of a publication could be as simple as counting how many times a publication is referenced. Might take years, but, it would better than the bullshit going on with paywalled journals.
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Instead of peer review, a measure of value of a publication could be as simple as counting how many times a publication is referenced.
Referenced by whom? Other papers that have been published the same way? I'm pretty sure there's a loophole somewhere in that scheme.
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I'm sure there is too, but as sophomoric as it is, it's probably no worse than the present system.
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Based on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] (so take it with a grain of salt), instead of YbCuO the real formula was YBaCuO. So yes, ytterbium became yttrium but not exactly as you claim.
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Based on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] (so take it with a grain of salt), instead of YbCuO the real formula was YBaCuO. So yes, ytterbium became yttrium but not exactly as you claim.
Can you specify what salt you refer to? NaCl? I want to be sure before I try to measure a grains worth. Also I'm having trouble deciding whether you mean troy grain, pearl grain or a size equivalence to some biological specimen.
Publishing in paywalled journals is fine (Score:5, Insightful)
So this really should be a ban on journal exclusivity, not a ban on paywalled journals. That is, full control of copyright should remain with the authors.
Death bell for subscription model (Score:3)
This is great news. I am an academic researcher and I fully support it. I've been working at two good small research institutes. Neither has journal subscritpions. Sci-hub works but is unstable and technically illegal. Getting the gorilla-sized funding agencies force the open model will finally get the journals to update. Never mind the screams from Nature, the established businesses always say this... then they adapt, quickly!
Excellent (Score:2)
All the reviewers, which do the main work, are working without pay anyways. The publishers (like Springer) are just greedy without bounds and without providing significant value. It is high time this stops.
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Breaking the academic publishing model (Score:1)
Sounds like a pretty good idea to me. Why should private publishing companies be allowed to charge huge fees to see the results of work that was, for the most part, publicly funded?
Like they haven't been asking for it? (Score:2)
A spokesperson for Springer Nature, which publishes more than 3,000 journals
If you hadn't engaged in blatant and absurd profiteering, this might not be happening. You've made your bed; now, be a good boy and lie in it.
And...Britannica says Wikipedia undermines (Score:2)
...the whole encyclopedia publishing system.
Re:OA (Score:4, Insightful)
"If everything has to be OA then there will be no profit and there will be no reason for those things to exist"
Open Access, yeah lucky we don't have such an idea in software...... oh wait.
A Little History (Score:3)
As a result, societies spun off their newsletters to publishers who had the resources needed for large circulations and they then
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Bollocks.
I'm not aware of any "learned society" (typically, the governing body for (eg) the Flange Sprocket Designers of Ruritania) that had it's journal "Open Access", in any form. Fellows accepted into the society might get an ink-on-paper (more recently, digital access) copy of the journal as part of their annual fees for membership. But that's not cheap. My society charges Fellows £176/year
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Why can there not be profit? (Score:2)
I can imagine an open access site that curates journals to read, that you pay for access to the list - you could have found and read any of the journals out in the open, the service is that someone has read through many in a field and narrowed down the interesting ones.
Look around you at the internet. So much content is free now, yet there are also a lot of people making money...
Re:Why can there not be profit? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are plenty of reasonable models for scientific publishing other than "reader pays". For instance, "author pays" can work well, so that the cost of publishing the results is part of the research grant. All publicly funded research results should be available to the public. We should just ignore the chicken-littles and their broken business models. The physics community has had arXiv.org for decades, and yet the world continues to turn.
Re:Why can there not be profit? (Score:5, Informative)
Author pays is a problem. It's worse than reader pays.
In the conventional model, libraries, with professional, highly educated, librarians, basically decide which journals are legit and which are scams. The libraries negotiate bulk rates with the power of large institutions.
In the "open access" model, each individual author, many of whom see an invitation to submit to a journal in their email and assume it's legit (seriously), have to decide which journals are good, and then hand over thousands of dollars per paper. That system is ripe for abuse, and IS abused, on a large scale. The vast majority of open access journals are scams.
Yes, physics, and some other disciplines, have had it right for a long time, but it is NOT this new open access model. You submit to arxiv, which operates efficiently and is funded by grants (costs a few bucks a paper), and anybody who wants to reads your paper there. You *then* submit to some closed-access journal. Much of computer science dispenses with the extra step and just has nobody-pays journals that operate on grants at the couple-of-bucks-a-paper level.
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As a researcher, from my point of view, funding agencies have way more influence on which journal I choose to publish in. In my environment, there are three groups of journals: Class 1 (Nature, Science, but also high-quality lesser-known journals such as Electrochimica Acta), Class 2 (not s
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Those journals are in those classes, in no small part because of the actions of the libraries. Why are high tier journals high tier? Because people read them and cite the work in them. If a bunch of libraries dump a journal, it's not going to get read, the work won't get cited, and it will drop down to the junk tier.
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I think most of the points you make are inaccurate.
"In the conventional model, libraries, with professional, highly educated, librarians, basically decide which journals are legit and which are scams. The libraries negotiate bulk rates with the power of large institutions."
The libraries negotiate bulk rates with the power of an medium size institution (which is most Universities) against two or three very large publishers. In general, they get a "big deal" which means that they do not actually choose the jo
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Lucky you in the UK. So when you go to submit to a journal do you ask the library which one they'll pay for? Are there lists of approved and excluded ones you check?
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We have a set of criteria rather than a list. But that is checked yes. Other places I don't know. It's not restrictive, although it nowadays the cash is starting to run out by the end of the year. WIth journals charges ranging between 400 and 4000 quid nobbling the expensive ones is an obvious way forward.
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One big scam is the hybrid journal, where you pay for the article to be OA, but you library still pays for a subscription to the journal. The new annoucement rules this out, so this is an advance.
There is another type of "hybrid" journal - free to publish (and thus not OA), but pay for "overpage charges" and make a killing on that. I'm looking at you, IEEE Transactions on [whatever]: the limit for a paper is 8 pages, but this includes mandatory author biographies (with photographs) and references. Since the average number of coauthors has gone up over the years, the bios easily take up a page. Down to 7. The editors require vast amounts of references in order to boost the citation indices of the jou
Re:Why can there not be profit? (Score:5, Interesting)
How about much simpler example from say the US perspective. How about the library of congress creates a scientific journal publishing site, you know buys one less F35 flying pig and they review and publish scientific articles (fraud and you will be straight on the hook for prosecution), all 100% available to the general public. This along with other things the Library of Congress should be doing in the digital age. Things like an anonymous public forum of record with properly registered users, a matter of public record of public opinion, no more lying about what public opinion is. Even a FOSS distribution centre as part of public publishing. With content creation much easier and publishing being even easier again and of course advertising being of little or no value, government publishing as a public service, a real library of congress becomes well, the sane thing to do.
Around the world, governments of all strips can build and run, their government digital publishing public service, for the benefit of all citizens accessing the service and indirectly promoting those who publish on it. FOSS of course becomes quite interesting when hosted by a Government publishers and how that connects into Universities and Industry as well as with direct access by the public.
A balance of cost versus savings, in this case savings to the public would far outweigh cost to the public.
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I think it's a very bad idea to let the government have a hand in financing the publication of scientific research in that way. Remember: articles have to be accessable for many decades. If the government suddenly decides they need two or three extra flying pigs, the money stream to the 'science servers' dries up, giving rise to all sorts of problems. And what is a government suddenly decides to have a say in what is published there? No, scientific publishing is better left to commercial organisations. With
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WTF? The US government has a HUGE hand in funding the research, so why should they not be involved in making sure that the most benefit is made from that research?
Oh, and by benefit, I do not mean profits, or even revenues, I mean that other researchers have access to it so that it speeds up and improves their own research.
Corporations have become so greedy that they cannot look at any function of government without trying to figure out how they can get their grubby paws on it and turn a profit for themselv
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You're kidding right? The US government has been a consistent source of scientific funding for over a century. I'd say in some cases they may get even a little too cavalier funding projects that wont go anywhere. The vast majority of modern technology is built on US gov research grants. They already have rules for any tech NASA develops. At the very least I think they should extend rules for anyone taking federal grant money and require OA publishing just like the EU institutions are doing. Nobody should be
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I totally agree, and I would extend that to taxpayer-financed patents. Indeed that phrase should be an oxymoron.
I would further extend that to all research done by a college, university, or research institution funded by even a single dollar of US government taxpayer or other derived revenue. If the US paid for it, it's owned by its citizens.
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Half of what we spend on research is wasted; I only wish I knew which half.
--
Oscar Wilde (or maybe it was Virginia Woolf).
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So they can fund it, but not make it available? Either they can't do either, or they can do both. Commercial organisations can just decide to stop making the papers available at the drop of a hat, whereas if the government is charged with keeping them available, they will.
I have no idea how you think private entities > the government when it comes to matters like this. We're not talking about pokemon, but scientific research.
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The physics community has had arXiv.org for decades, and yet the world continues to turn.
So my question is: if we put it out right away on the arXiv, does that satisfy the funding agency's "open" requirements? Our mode is to put it in arXiv right away, but also send it off for peer review in APS journals such as Physical Review (which are subscription based, if not as rapacious as the Elsevier journals) that publish the final versions of the articles out weeks/months later.
I guess it all depends on the defintion of "compliant Open Access Platforms" (from TFA).
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I wonder if there could be the possibility for a mixed-model. Open Access, but still show some support for the researcher? As in a Patreon for Science?
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So like, New Scientist magazine, but for OA?
It might be more likely to work as a free service with a donation model.
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So to read open access journals you will need to weed through many levels of ads? Or have that fact that you are reading an article on topic X to be recorded and sent to either a marking company to sell you "all the scientific equipment you need to help peer review and validate those results!" or send to the government to either flag you as a threat, or recruit you in military research in the topic.
Internet Content isn't free. We are paying for it in one way or another. People pay the content providers for
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Re:OA (Score:5, Insightful)
The only ones who makes money, and therefore stands to lose, are the journals. In the past they did provide a valuable service, but in the digital age they're just trying to cling onto an antiquated business model and shove it down the rest of the world's throat. Well, screw them. Sorry about your business model, but that's the way it goes. Their time has come and gone, now it is time to open up science to the people who paid for it in the first place. It's absurd that tax dollars should go to producing documents that the tax payers then have to pay $40 to read.
I see no long term downside to this.
Re:OA (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure, I was taught that the whole modern "scientific method" was based on Newton, et al., rejecting the publishers as gatekeepers and publishing through the newsletters of their local Philosophic Societies. The main thing that was supposedly holding back Natural Philosophy (what science was called then) was the gatekeepers! It worked fine for a long time. At first the "Journals" were just a type of group publishing, just a like a Philosophic Society newsletter. But once they started assigning a system of Peers as gatekeepers, the whole thing was instantly a farce; the same thing that open publishing had already replaced once!
Peer review was valuable, historically, because it was done by your peers, accomplished through open access. Naming a class of Very Important People as Peers does not in any way achieve the same thing.
I guess I agree publishing companies provided a valuable service in the past, I'm just saying, the time when that was true was pre-Newton!
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> The people doing the work aren't making any profit anyway. The funding comes from taxes, and the scientists aren't getting paid if someone buys a copy of their paper,
Excuse me, please. What? Salaries paid to research staff come from that funding. Simply because funding comes from taxes does not by some curious substantiation not exist as "profit". And publication is critical to getting more funding, or to getting hired in education or getting tenure.
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Elsevier and the other companies are not paying researchers or research assistants. It's the actual funding authorities who are paying those salaries who are clamping down on for-profit publishers.
The mistake people in this thread are making is in assuming that for-profit publishing is providing a financial benefit to researchers. Actually, it provides no financial benefit to researchers, and they have to pay to access the research of others so it's a financial negative. They provide a service in curating,
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> The mistake people in this thread are making is in assuming that for-profit publishing is providing a financial benefit to researchers.
I'm sorry, but you seem to have left out a critical step. It is critical at review time for research staff. The number of publications is a critical factor for research personnel, even as co-authors or contributors. So yes, there is a fiscal benefit to the authors of content in paid-for publications.
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You are correct at the moment. But the review is important for one reason - funding. If the funding authorities have made a decision that they require OA, then they will not punish research groups for not publishing in journals that do not conform to their standard.
I expect what they will do is drastically downgrade the ratings of the journals that do not conform, so that if Nature was #1 ranked, but its publishing rules do not support OA, then they will be downgraded to #3 or even be a negative. So funding
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"Requiring QA" would be a much more complex standard requiring quality evaluations of those quality evaluations. It would be unenforceable in practice, and could be abused to infringe politically on publishers and authors by rejecting their "QA". I think we'll find that ut is far simpler and more even handed, to simply refuse to fund research published in paid journals.
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I am using "OA" as Open Access, where you seem to have misread it as QA.
You are right that it does provide a handy rule of thumb, but the funding authorities will have to figure that out - after all, they have to allocate their funding.
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Oh, dear. You're quite right, and my analysis was confused. I've never seen "Open Access" written as a as the abbreviation.
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The mistake people in this thread are making is in assuming that for-profit publishing is providing a financial benefit to researchers. Actually, it provides no financial benefit to researchers, and they have to pay to access the research of others so it's a financial negative.
Not entirely true, see orzetto's comment [slashdot.org] above:
As a researcher, from my point of view, funding agencies have way more influence on which journal I choose to publish in. In my environment, there are three groups of journals: Class 1 (Nature, Science, but also high-quality lesser-known journals such as Electrochimica Acta), Class 2 (not so good, but still legit, like Journal of Power Sources and most scientific journals), and unclassified junk (the kind of journals that spam researcher promising "fast peer review" and "open access", for a fee of course). Which journal you publish in directly affects your funding, and it's the researchers who produce the content.
The number of publications and quality of journals also impacts tenure - so opportunities for corruption are abundant.
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"potentially undermines the whole research publishing system."
No, it potentially undermines the whole commercial research publishing system.
While the internet is not a good peer review forum, some kind of quality control has to be active. These can also be bad, as they may introduce censorship of opposing and controversial ideas.
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Re:OA (Score:5, Insightful)
Scientist expect to be able to access the bulk of research papers because it's integral to science itself. The paywalling of such papers makes the majority of them inaccessible to scientists and the public. Nobody, especially the average scientist/researcher, has the near unlimited funds that would be needed to search out data from the wide array of papers and publications out there. And yet, the sharing of information and collaboration of knowledge is a vital process to the enrichment of science itself.
The paywalls are massive detriment to the progress of science and humanity. Fuck the fees!
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Pretty sure there is plenty of profit in taking in a 4 figure sum amount of money in order to have some magic eyes(who are already getting funding as well from other sources!) look it through and put something on a website in addition to printing it on paper and sending it to people where it gets further peer review.
Some open access papers manage to do it for under 30 bucks.
Actual peer review starts after it's published anyways.
the real reason they have been able to churn profits with them is the back catal
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There are plenty of ways to profit off of open access.
You can do sell consulting services, sell physical distributions, offer support services.
Or am I talking about open source software? Is there a difference between publications vs software?
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Not to mention T-shirts, hats, lunchboxes...
I think so. For one, I've heard of consultants who install, configure and customize software to fit users' needs but I've never heard of any doing that for publications. Secondly, there aren't multiple versions of each scientific paper that don't quite work the same.
Re: OA (Score:1)
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If everything has to be OA then there will be no profit and there will be no reason for those things to exist.
Excactly. Then the leeches who provide no value and do nothing but rent seek will finally go out of business.
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Publications usually cost fees for the researcher. In OA it is obvious why, those fees pay for running the OA publication system.
But publishers charge authors for non-open access too. http://cofactorscience.com/blog/author-charges [cofactorscience.com] has some examples, although that list is 6 years old by now.
In that case, the publishers collect money from author AND subscriber. We might as well put the money into financing OA and make the results free to access.
Of course, traditional publishers will lose out that way. Sucks t