Science Journals Are Laughing All the Way To the Bank, Locking the Results of Publicly Funded Research Behind Exorbitant Paywalls. This Must Be Stopped. (newscientist.com) 140
Here is a trivia question for you: what is the most profitable business in the world? You might think oil, or maybe banking. You would be wrong. The answer is academic publishing. Its profit margins are vast, reportedly in the region of 40 per cent. New Scientist: The reason it is so lucrative is because most of the costs of its content is picked up by taxpayers. Publicly funded researchers do the work, write it up and judge its merits. And yet the resulting intellectual property ends up in the hands of the publishers. To rub salt into the wound they then sell it via exorbitant subscriptions and paywalls, often paid for by taxpayers too.
The academic publishing business model is indefensible. Practically everybody -- even the companies that profit from it -- acknowledges that it has to change. And yet the status quo has proven extremely resilient. The latest attempt to break the mould is called Plan S, created by umbrella group cOAlition S. It demands that all publicly funded research be made freely available. When Plan S was unveiled in September, its backers expected support to snowball. But only a minority of Europe's 43 research funding bodies have signed up, and hoped-for participation from the US has failed to materialise. Meanwhile, a grass-roots campaign against it is gathering momentum. Plan S deserves a chance.
The academic publishing business model is indefensible. Practically everybody -- even the companies that profit from it -- acknowledges that it has to change. And yet the status quo has proven extremely resilient. The latest attempt to break the mould is called Plan S, created by umbrella group cOAlition S. It demands that all publicly funded research be made freely available. When Plan S was unveiled in September, its backers expected support to snowball. But only a minority of Europe's 43 research funding bodies have signed up, and hoped-for participation from the US has failed to materialise. Meanwhile, a grass-roots campaign against it is gathering momentum. Plan S deserves a chance.
The real reason it's locked away (Score:5, Insightful)
If all of the public research was public, then we'd all be able to see how much of it is a sham [sciencealert.com].
This is of course a great reason to mandate that all publicly funded research be made completely free to access. For-Pay journals could well survive just by curating the most interesting an accurate of them, and it's likely the quality of journals would go up as a result.
Building back up the credibility of science in general is a huge need at present, because the lack of it is allowing things like anti-vac sentiment and other crazy ideas to spread like wildfire.
Re:The real reason it's locked away (Score:5, Interesting)
Repeal the Bayh-Dole Act, which allows universities to patent publicly funded research. Universities draw lots of money from the indirect (facilities and administrative; F&A) costs that are included in grants. It's often a bit over 50% of the modified total direct costs for a grant. For a grant with $200,000 of direct costs, the university might add on $100,000 in F&A costs. They don't need the patents, and it often doesn't even bring in a lot of money for universities to do so. Instead, require that data and software generated by the project be publicly available, either under an open source license or in the public domain. My institution lets me own the copyrights to the software I create for my research, so I've started releasing it under the GPL. It would allow for easy reproducibility and I don't think it would really harm universities.
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Those sound like pretty good ideas, though I wonder if some universities would back off research if they didn't think there was potential patent profit there.
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Those sound like pretty good ideas, though I wonder if some universities would back off research if they didn't think there was potential patent profit there.
Publishing your paper on an open site has nothing to do with the patentability of your research. Open publication should be mandatory for any public-funded science.
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Publication and patent are not orthogonal, but are not totally correlated either. In fact, federal agencies can and frequently do patent things that their employees and occasionally contractors come up with, then license the patents back to those or other contractors for further research or even building something. If somebody patents something that they got federal money for, the feds usually retain some kind of license to use it; certainly, we insisted on that when universities did research for us (a stat
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Universities draw lots of money from the indirect (facilities and administrative; F&A) costs that are included in grants. It's often a bit over 50% of the modified total direct costs for a grant.
Perhaps in the US but in most other countries, it is much less - about 25% IIRC in Canada and something similar in the UK. One way the US government could make its research funding go a lot further would be to set a fixed overhead rate paid to the university separate to the grant that researchers get and make it a condition that no overhead is charged on the researcher portion. This would put a stop the appallingly bloated overhead costs that US universities force their researchers to pay.
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Tenured professor here.
You're right on the money.
These things need to happen to really restore scientific integrity:
1. Indirect costs on grants need to be eliminated. It allows slush funds on grants that universities siphon off for profits because it's all murky money. Lots of people have cried foul when this has been suggested (by the GOP mostly, ironically), but essentially what's happening is the federal government is being used as a crutch to keep universities going. The problem is that then all the def
Re:The real reason it's locked away (Score:5, Interesting)
I've seen the skew that can occur for scientific research, both for physically testable results and for socially interpreted data. In at least some cases where results were replicated and failed, there was a subtle distinction in the experimental setup that skewed the results. I've personally exposed such a situation, where the equipment was not used consistently due to availability. When I reviewed the data, I found that the correlation being reported had almost nothing to do with what they thought they were measuring, and was overwhelmed by the status of the measurement equipment. I was also _blessed_ that my supervisor recorded _everything_, and the original data had not been pruned of "irrelevant" information.
The same occurs in the software world: casual speed tests of small samples of data. Data that is often selected for optimum qualities, do not scale up reliably. It's especially true for personal skunkworks projects that deal with none of the exceptional cases.
Re:The real reason it's locked away (Score:5, Insightful)
If all of the public research was public, then we'd all be able to see how much of it is a sham.
Huh?
We already know. It's been reported on repeatedly. And for anyone interested in looking, many papers are available freely online even with paywalled journals and, frankly, most people aren't going to check because until you know the jargon of the field even a sound paper is indistinguishable from gibberish half the time.
This is of course a great reason to mandate that all publicly funded research be made completely free to access.
No. The reason to mandate it is so people have access to the research. Not so that people can see what a sham science is (clutches pearls). Science is the only way of knowing we actually have. That doesn't make it magically immune from Sturgeon's law. Anyone who is surpised by that is naive.
And yet science advances.
For-Pay journals could well survive just by curating the most interesting
That's what the top journals already do. Not all journals are equal.
an accurate of them,
Well, interesting is not the same as accurate *cough*nature*cough*.
and it's likely the quality of journals would go up as a result.
Doubtful. The top journals will continue to have the flashiest results. Given that most journals let authors pup papers up on their own website and allow preprints on arvix/bioarxiv (apparently biologists are too snooty to use something dirtied by pyhsicists), there won't be much difference.
Not really. Science doesn't have a credibility problem, at least not among people who will ever not see it as having a credibility problem. Those people can't be reached anyway so there's little point in trying.
because the lack of it is allowing things like anti-vac sentiment and other crazy ideas to spread like wildfire.
Humans will always be irrational. Fixing the journals won't make humans less rational. You might as well argue that science has a cedibility problem because flat-earthers exist.
the good old Netscape sham (Score:2)
What you mean is that too many studies are underpowered, so you get a lot of false positives over the 0.95 bar.
We can fix this by making every study 4 to 10 times more expensive (everybody gets a huge N, except perhaps in the cases where the study population is finite, regardless of budget).
Would we actually be better off, or have you just made science twice as expensive as it really needs to be?
Another implicit a
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Would we actually be better off, or have you just made science twice as expensive as it really needs to be?
That is a pretty interesting question...
It sure seems like we would be better off, having fewer studies that were more certain as to result and accuracy of publication. That way there would be fewer studies overall to read, and even if fewer studies were done the greater reliance that you could base further research of published studies sure seems like it would be a big win. Right now it seems like w
Re: Good thing (Score:3, Insightful)
No government money is going to middlemen who offer nothing of value.
It's basically hijacking taxpayer content at this this point and reselling something they got for free.
Re: Good thing (Score:4, Informative)
You're wrong. The post you're replying to is mostly correct.
As an author, I have to pay for page charges when a manuscript I submitted gets accepted for publication. Saying the publishers get the content for free isn't quite an accurate picture because the author has to actually pay the publisher.
The content is potentially being locked away, because authors generally have to sign over their copyrights in the process. In the journals I've published in, authors retain limited rights, such as being allowed to use figures in funding proposals. However, there are significant restrictions, so the content is, in effect, being locked away.
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This really depends on the field. I've worked with physics, chemistry and astronomy journals. Publishing fees for the author are only there for open access (and not all of them). The publisher retains copyright only on the edited, formatted version of the paper, or in a couple cases retains full copyright but explicitly lets the author do what they want with the preprint (I've heard this is very different in the biological sciences). So pretty much the vast majority of physics and astronomy papers get p
Alternative to this model (Score:1)
Reviewers and editors often don't get paid for their work. It's considered a synergistic activity and is often viewed favorably when applying for grants. The real costs are copy editors, printing costs, and maintaining servers. Arguably, printing costs should be covered by subscribers rather than contributors. I'd like to see restrictions on public funding used to pay for publication in for-profit journals, especially predatory open access journals and publishers with paywalls.
In my field of meteorology
Turning back the clock (Score:3)
As the number of letters grew it became too much effort and expense for these societies to publish all of them given the technology of the day and so they sold them off to professional publishers who organized the peer review, editing and publis
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Reviewers and editors often don't get paid for their work. It's considered a synergistic activity and is often viewed favorably when applying for grants. The real costs are copy editors, printing costs, and maintaining servers. Arguably, printing costs should be covered by subscribers rather than contributors. I'd like to see restrictions on public funding used to pay for publication in for-profit journals, especially predatory open access journals and publishers with paywalls.
In my field of meteorology, some of the most impactful journals are operated by professional societies like the American Meteorological Society (AMS), and this is how other fields should work as well. I don't like AMS putting papers behind paywalls and charging high prices unless an open access fee is paid, though at least it's only behind the paywall for something like three years. While AMS could be better, it's a very viable alternative to publishers that bury articles behind expensive paywalls in perpetuity. Funding agencies should encourage and insist that results be published in these types of journals.
Same here: most journals originated with our international scientific associations, but got into the hands of international publishers because of the difficulty of publishing and distributing when most of this happened. Impactful journals are generally relatively old as it takes time to build a reputation, so most were established before online publishing and open access were things.
Most of the real work is indeed done without cost to the journal: researching, writing, reviewing, deciding, (substance) editi
How can this be (Score:2)
Bureaucrats, our Educational System, the Establishment, the Government, Politicians and Scientists are beyond reproach. They only have the good of humanity on their minds. They continually sacrifice their own welfare for humanity as a whole.
This must be Fake News!
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.humor.
Um humour is supposed to be funny. I think you meant ".sarcasm.".
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Make it public (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Make it public (Score:5, Insightful)
If it isn't, it is a moral imperative that you free the information [sci-hub.tw].
Many scientists agree with you. Possibly even most.
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I'd suggest being cautious about the "information should be free" politics. It's led to some tragedy, such as Aaron Swartz repeatedly disabling JSTOR by overwhelming its servers, and killing himself rather than face the criminal charges for his abuse. Since JSTOR is a not-for-profit enterprise, generous with its free subscriptions, that _organizes_ the data and makes it searchable and organizes it, it's quite understandable that they charge modest fees to _organize_ the information and make it accessible.
Th
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I'd suggest being cautious about the "information should be free" politics. It's led to some tragedy, such as Aaron Swartz repeatedly disabling JSTOR by overwhelming its servers, and killing himself rather than face the criminal charges for his abuse. Since JSTOR is a not-for-profit enterprise, generous with its free subscriptions, that _organizes_ the data and makes it searchable and organizes it, it's quite understandable that they charge modest fees to _organize_ the information and make it accessible.
The idea is laudable. But organizing the information, and editing it or providing peer review to provide some credence to the published claims, can be difficult and even impossible without some money in the process. I'll be very interested to see if sch-hub manages to avoid flooding with what is essentially worthless or even fraudulent content.
You're right that it costs money to archive, index, screen (and for journals, type-set and proofread) articles. However, the costs are now really low compared to the printing-press days, and the opportunity cost of keeping the articles behind a pay wall are big.
I'm a scientist at a good research university, so I can access almost all articles anyways through our university subscriptions. However, I very often get stuff from sci-hub just because its easier than dealing with proxies, logging on, etc. But wors
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I also agree with the principle that taxpayer funded research should be free to the public. I'm a strong advocate of GPL software licenses, as well, for publicly funded research.
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If it's publicly funded it should be accessible to the public.
First, I agree with you - or, at a minimum, any profit generated from the research should be paid back to the public (perhaps in the form of providing new funding to support more research).
Second, this piece is factually incorrect. The publishers do not own or control the intellectual property created by the research, as the submission attempts to imply through pedantic weasel words (probably hoping no one looks too close). The publishers do largely control how the information is initially disseminated, wh
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Isn't it already required to be publically available if it was funded by the NSF [nsf.gov]? Most of these peer-reviewed articles are probably already on PubMed [nih.gov], or at least the abstract is, if you want to bookmark it and wait until it becomes free.
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You are correct, from personal experience on projects I've worked with. How the work gets from NSF projects to industry products can involve fascinating bureaucracy.
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Yeah, a lot of science funders mandate and/or facilitate open access publishing. The problem is that most of this goes to 'hybrid' journals, which means that the university still needs to pay a subscription to the journal. This leads to the publisher being paid twice (by the taxman): once for publishing (APC), and once for the subscription. It also means there is still no free and open "database" of public knowledge. The current "plan S" goes further than this requiring publication is fully open access jour
Not my experience (Score:5, Informative)
As a computational biologists in europe, i see a notable change in granting bodies that require open access publications. We have to put this in writing when we apply for grants. This happens on both national and EU level, so my experience is quite different than tfa.
Re:Not my experience (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a good idea, but needs to be used with caution. The push toward open access publishing has led to the creation of predatory open access journals. These are journals that charge publication fees of the authors and claim to conduct peer review, but don't actually do so. I've personally received a number of emails asking me to be an editor for such journals. The journals pretend to conduct peer review, but either it's a complete joke or manuscripts aren't sent out at all. I've heard allegations that those journals also may threaten legal action against people who accuse them of being predatory. I support open access publishing, but there also needs to be standards that require legitimate peer review to occur.
Define peer review, then collect evidence (Score:3)
The push toward open access publishing has led to the creation of [...] journals that charge publication fees of the authors
So far, you've described a vanity press [wikipedia.org].
and claim to conduct peer review, but don't actually do so.
Here's an exercise: Define what is and isn't adequate peer review.
I've heard allegations that those journals also may threaten legal action against people who accuse them of being predatory.
Once you have somewhat rigorously defined peer review, you can collect and present evidence that a particular publication acts as a vanity press. This evidence should make a defense in a defamation suit practical.
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> Vanity press has little to no quality threshold for publishing and advertises as such.
The same is true for some journals, particularly those involving "grievance studies". See https://www.nytimes.com/2018/1... [nytimes.com] .
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I think those particular initiatives, while admirable, are missing the point. It's great that scientific publishing moves to a free-to-read model, but the real problem is the predatory pricing. $2000+ to "coordinate" volunteer reviewers (i.e. send some e-mails) and then put a PDF on a website is ridiculous, whether that fee is paid by libraries through subscriptions or by authors themselves.
The machine learning community has long supported its own journals that are entirely free, and while physics journals
Re:Intellectual Property (Score:5, Interesting)
Academic publishers have every right to protect their intellectual property and charge for access.
By "intellectual property", do you refer to patents, trademarks, or trade secrets in addition to copyrights? If so, which? The appropriate policy reasoning is likely to depend on the significant differences among these areas of law [gnu.org]. If not, why use the term "intellectual property" instead of "copyright" which is both shorter and more precise?
And why haven't we seen a price war among journals to attract subscribers from other journals?
Re:Intellectual Property (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering the fact that the writers are using my tax money to create that property, shouldn't I get some stock/compensation for said property?
Region-lock nationally funded research (Score:3)
Say a particular article is the result of research funded by a particular country. Would it be acceptable if access to that article without charge were region locked to its sponsor country, where one would need to log in with a taxpayer ID and password to view it?
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Say a particular article is the result of research funded by a particular country. Would it be acceptable if access to that article without charge were region locked to its sponsor country, where one would need to log in with a taxpayer ID and password to view it?
Some details need to be worked out, but how about this?
1. Unless we have a specific trade deal that includes it the result of publicly funded research is free to use for companies in the country of origin, and the articles are free as well. If that company wants to sell overseas, then the profits must come back to this country to qualify. Otherwise they must license it as in (2).
2. Otherwise the other countries need to license the IP and/or pay to read the articles. The licensing terms should be reasonab
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Considering the fact ... shouldn't I get some stock/compensation?
You got screwed. What else do you want?
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The rub is that they get their funding from public funds. So it's not really their IP.
40% margin is very reasonable (Score:1)
The solution is scihub (Score:1)
Fuck Elsevier, and the politicians that support their parasitic business model. Visit scihub for all the academic papers you need. Tell your friends.
Piracy was the only practical way to demonstrate your unhappiness with the music industry. It looks like the science journals will have to learn the hard way too.
These People Will Kill To Protect Their Business (Score:5, Insightful)
Never forget what these people did to Aaron Swartz. [wikipedia.org]
They have killed to protect their business model.
Never doubt they'll do it again.
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Aaron Swartz repeatedly disabled a non-profit service that helps scientific research around the world. He could have plugged his laptop into his own network connection at his office at Harvard, and instead chose to plug his laptop into a wiring closet at MIT and abuse their network resources and interfer with _their_ research. He faced criminal charges for his cowardly abuse, and took the coward's way out rather than face his day in court. He was the abuser, not the abused.
basic assumptions incorrect (Score:2)
Publicly funded researchers do the work, write it up and judge its merits. And yet the resulting intellectual property ends up in the hands of the publishers.
This quotation is blatantly false. The rest of the summary is flamebait.
1. The IP generated by the research, depending on funding source, goes to the inventor, their employer, and, sometimes, the funding source. The COPYRIGHT of the publication sometimes, goes to the publisher, depending on a lot of factors. (*)
2. If you are getting public funds (i.e., NIH funds), you have enough to pay for open-access fees, and, then, the authors retain copyright. Don't agree? A typical R01 grant (the bread-and-butter
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You missed one in #1. The vast majority of IP generated by academic research is released into the public domain. IP is only protected if the researchers and their institution decide to patent. Particular software implementations can be protected as well, but that also happens very rarely, and the nature of academia means you have to tell everyone how your super-secret program works anyway.
They will change to survive (Score:2)
I publish in the field of atmospheric science. The American Meteorological Society journals are the "gold standard" amongst my research peers. While I am not happy with how much it costs to publish and subscribe to the AMS journals (the former is covered by NSF grants, the latter is "subsidized" by the university), all I know as a scientist is (a) I have to publish there to get maximum impact (b) I have to read everything in there to keep up and because the authors will likely be reviewing my future manuscr
Hyperbole doesn't help (Score:2)
academic publishing. The answer is academic publishing. Its profit margins are vast, reportedly in the region of 40 per cent.
Hyperbole doesn't help make the argument. Many forms of digital asset distribution, such as software sales, have profit margins at least as high. Even chip manufacturing has gross profit in the region of 40%, higher for some boutique parts.
Agree that academic publishing has degenerated to a harmful racket.
It's that important (Score:2)
Remember Alexandra Elbakyan? Science's Pirate Queen. She's the creator or Sci-Hub, the website that provides free access to million
Not a simple problem (Score:2)
I'd really like to see all journals be open.
One problem that arises is that science puts a lot of weight on research published in high impact refereed journals. There is a general believe that a paper in Nature or Science or the like has been carefully reviewed. The really is due to the reputation of those journals.
Open journals may eventually gain the same reputation, but it is not an instant process. There are a lot of junk journals out there that will claim to referee, but are really "pay to publis
Scientific papers as advertising (Score:2)
See if you can do better (Score:2)
FOIA? (Score:2)
Shouldn't this all be covered by the Freedom of Information Act? What taxpayers pay for, taxpayers should have access to, or else we shouldn't be funding them.