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The Future of Science Publishing (acs.org) 20
A decade ago, the Gates Foundation announced it will cease covering open-access publishing costs for its grantees from 2025. This shift, following a decade of support for free access to research, sparked concerns in the scientific community. Experts fear the move could undermine the open-access model, which aims to make taxpayer-funded studies freely available. The decision also marked a significant change in the foundation's approach to disseminating research findings, potentially impacting global access to critical scientific information. So where do we go from here? From a report: [The Gates Foundation] notes that open access in its current form has resulted in "some unsavory publishing practices," including unchecked pricing from journals and publishers, questionable peer review, and paper mills -- people or organizations that produce fake or subpar papers and sell authorship slots on them. "Last year was a really pivotal year in scholarly publishing since lots of people who were really pushing gold open access for many years are now thinking, 'Oh, what beast have we created?'" says James Butcher, an independent publishing consultant in Liverpool, England, who writes the newsletter Journalology. "It plays into the hands of the big corporates because it's all about scale."
Gold OA creates incentives for journals to publish as many papers as possible to make more money. Some publishers, often referred to as gray OA publishers, have been criticized for exploiting the gold OA model to churn out high volumes of low-quality studies. Butcher says that because subscription- based publishers traditionally couldn't increase revenues by publishing more papers, they tended to keep volumes fairly level. In contrast, Johan Rooryck, a French linguistics researcher at Leiden University and a proponent of open access, points to a "very rapid rise" in gold OA journals and papers in the past decade. The Gates Foundation is now suggesting that authors post online preprints of their author-accepted manuscripts -- near-final versions of studies accepted by journals for publication before they are typeset or copyedited -- and then publish in whichever journals they like.
Gold OA creates incentives for journals to publish as many papers as possible to make more money. Some publishers, often referred to as gray OA publishers, have been criticized for exploiting the gold OA model to churn out high volumes of low-quality studies. Butcher says that because subscription- based publishers traditionally couldn't increase revenues by publishing more papers, they tended to keep volumes fairly level. In contrast, Johan Rooryck, a French linguistics researcher at Leiden University and a proponent of open access, points to a "very rapid rise" in gold OA journals and papers in the past decade. The Gates Foundation is now suggesting that authors post online preprints of their author-accepted manuscripts -- near-final versions of studies accepted by journals for publication before they are typeset or copyedited -- and then publish in whichever journals they like.
"I just wanted to share facts about various airs!" (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:"I just wanted to share facts about various air (Score:5, Interesting)
As a non-scientist, the fact that a community supposedly made up of the most rigorously logical people on the planet allowed the environment they all depend on to do even the most basic work to become so completely polluted, fractured, and conquered by rent-seeking a-holes is, well, it's really funny. It's like that comedian used to say about a visit to the state fair: It makes you feel like even your screwed-up family is relatively normal by comparison.
I don't know that "allowed" is the right word. I think this happens because of a lack of empathetic understanding. Now, don't get me wrong, empathy should exist, but it's really hard for well-intentioned people to have empathetic understand of downright bastards. And what's worse? Downright bastards are really good at organizing around a central concept of corruption, even if that organizing looks really odd and pear shaped from the outside until it comes to a head.
Rent-seeking hucksters are always going to overwhelm anyplace they see a potential for profit, because that's what they do. And well-intentioned groups that can't have a moment of empathetic understand for these sociopathic entities, whether they be people or publishers or whoever, because it would mean setting aside their good intentions, however briefly, and they can't imagine others doing that. "Certainly we're far above that," is a vibe you get from folks like these. Usually right before the floodwaters close over their heads.
Rent seeking questions (Score:2)
How do we provide a place for the tens of thousands of current PhD candidates to publish research?
How do we provide a place for the tens of thousands of early career researchers to publish research so that they can get a tenure track job or move from a tenure track position to a tenured professor job?
And more questions for getting grants, getting a 'promotion' from a backwater college to a state college and then a promotion to an internationally renown university, ...
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Science lives on grants, and grants are evaluated by non-scientists on the basis of the publications they generate and the ratings of the journals.
So, if you don't have a name, but only great ideas that require funding, good luck.
Re:"I just wanted to share facts about various air (Score:4, Informative)
Grants are evaluated by scientists. They're peer reviewed, just like everything else.
In the health field, a fairly new thing is inviting "lay reviewers" to participate. They tend to be actual patients, and usually there's one of those to every three or four scientists reviewing a given grant.
Re: (Score:3)
As a non-scientist, the fact that a community supposedly made up of the most rigorously logical people on the planet allowed
Scientists are employed by non scientists. They all know it sucks. You can choose to take a gamble on your entire career by not playing the game, but is that the logical choice?
Re: (Score:2)
Ah, but if they all banded together...
I'm joking, of course. Nobody ever does that.
Citations needed (Score:2)
Sort of interesting FP, but why the censor mods? Criticizing the writing style?
As someone who made a good living helping people publish scientific papers, I have to admit that the system was breaking down even before I (was) retired. These years the most interesting stuff seems to be on the arxiv.org website way before it appears on paper (if ever).
Anyone around here read Science Fictions about the general problems? I saw another very interesting description of the book, but it isn't available in English
Re:"I just wanted to share facts about various air (Score:4, Informative)
Publishing isn't something that most scientists do, and there's no real reason to expect them to be any more competent in that area than anybody else.
I have friends who've started journals. They're big open science fans too, but they haven't got a clue what they're doing. They have no choice but to hire a publisher, or at least an employee who knows how to do it. Back in the days of actual physical publications the actual printing, binding and distribution would cost quite a bit. But they don't really know any more about publishing online than they do about the dead tree kind. Take an employee to actually do the computer stuff and some admin, divide by the number of papers a non-paper mill small journal will do, and you get about $500 a year.
Many of the computer science journals, on the other hand, are free to publish and to read. Their costs are $1 to register a DOI and some hundreds of dollars a year for various registration fees involved with being eligibile to recieve small grants to cover those fees. Arxiv estimates their costs are about $6 a paper all in, which includes development costs of the platform.
Sue (Score:1)
Under 17 U.S.C. Section 105 the federal government of the United States is prohibited from acquiring a copyright unless it is a gift or it is bequeathed by an estate.
The justification for this law is two-fold. One, it prevents the government from abusing what is clearly a commercial right established for authors and inventors in the Constitution and two, it prevents the government from using taxpayer money to hoard intellectual property from the public domain.
In other words, under federal law, if it is publ
Re: (Score:2)
Lol, $2000 is a bargain.
Nature's gold open access fee is £8890.00/$12290.00/€10290.00.
Rules and Mindless Money Hunting (Score:3)
The trouble with the system is that they are trying to set up rules so that good practices are encouraged,
but with companies and many researchers chasing profit and prestige, with profit measured in money,
and prestige measured in publication metrics, rather than being motivated by the altruistic goal of
"producing the best science for the benefit of all humanity", it is no surprise that undesirable patterns
develop. For every good scientist, there are businesspeople and less scrupulous researchers chasing
money and metrics. Likely there is no right way to set rules so that money and metric hunting magically
produces the best outcomes. Eventually those prioritising money and metrics will find ways to boost
money and metrics at the expense of quality. The money hunter wants to maximise the amount of
money they get for each unit of quality delivered. But those interested in the best outcome for
science and humanity want the opposite: they want to maximise the amount of quality research
that gets generated for each dollar spent. Clever rules can only do so much to keep these
two disparate goals in line.
No funny yet? (Score:2)
So does anyone have a funny paper to cite?
Tenure is broken (Score:4, Insightful)
In what rational universe does this not lead to desperate people publishing questionable results, paying for publications, and engaging in quid-pro-quo peer review?
Re: (Score:2)
The very concept of tenure is broken. It should not be a thing.
I once interviewed with a company that bragged that they "never fired anyone." I turned them down, based on that principle alone. This company was engaging in...tenure.
It should always be possible to fire someone who is not performing. Tenure just invites people to stop being productive. Why else do you think these tenured professors...stop actually teaching, instead getting GAs to do it!
The real problem is journal publishing (Score:2)
The entire industry - well, the few majors left - is literally set up as a vanity press. You *pay* to be published, the peer review is volunteer, and then libraries, etc, pay for the journals. The authors get NOTHING; they pay.
I see there's a group, can't remember the name, who have started a co-op. I hope the journal publishers crash and burn.
Re: (Score:3)
Not really. Not at all, actually. There are still plenty of subscription journals, and many of them have the same problem with paper mills as open access journals have. They are also often as unwilling to fix their problems.
The problem is publish or perish – you need to publish to further your career, no matter how weak your findings are. Your quality as a researcher is usually evaluated on output, both in volume and in the supposed quality of the journals you publish in (ranked by the rate of citatio
Pale Blue Pod on Publishing (Score:2)
Just the other day I was listening to Pale Blue Pod's episode from 7/7, on publishing. Was pretty shocked at the business that publishing is.
Sometimes $3000 to then get published, reviewed by volunteers, then 1000s of $ for an annual subscription on the publisher's outlet. Those tantalizing amounts are only possible for larger clients like uni's, a selection of libraries and some corporations.
What's going on with that!? How come publishers get and/or need so much money!? Is it that expensive to vet and sele