Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

I also don't like it but the paper needs be printed and reviewed. This is not free. Perhaps we should agree that the publishing group pays for the entire cost of the article so that it can be free after the process of publishing it? Or boycot paywalled publishers, maybe go for PLOS? If you have ever complained about paywalls, don't ever publish in a paywalled journal yourself.

I'm all for free papers by the way, nothing is more annoying that researching things and hitting paywalls but someone has got to pay the people doing the publishing work.

Also: If I order a paper from our library or I download it myself, it often comes with an on the fly generated cover page with my IP address on it. One can remove that, certainly but there may be other mechanisms to tag papers. Amazon reportedly investigated (and implemented?) putting specific, unique errors in DRM free ebook copies to identify sources of piracy. So I wouldn't advice you to just send the PDF around unless you are the author maybe and have a PDF that did not go through the publishing process.

Still loving the initiative though ;)

> I also don't like it but the paper needs be printed and reviewed.

- Reviews are always free (nobody gets paid for reviewing academic paper, in contrast to grant proposal for which we are sometimes paid)

- I have not seen a printed version of a journal for a while (except the very big ones like Nature or Science, but we buy them mostly for the news/view section, not that much for the academic papers at the end)

- Copy editors never did anything useful to my papers. In CS, we usually submit a nice latex file and they do not really do any work on the layout (it might be different in other fields, where people submit crappy MS Word files).

... so, let's say that the added value of the publisher (even for PLOS) is marginal...

So why do open access online-only publishers like PLoS charge $3k/article? Is that just pure profit?

- Biomedicine primarily uses word, and it's a major area of publishing. I'd also contest that many latex files end up "nice" - I've read more than my share of incoherently organized and formatted latex.

- Some of us like printed journals. I subscribe to at least three.

> I also don't like it but the paper needs be printed and reviewed. This is not free.

I have peer reviewed various academic papers for Elsevier without receiving any monetary compensation. Moreover, quite small amount of academic papers is read in a printed form, at least among my colleagues.

Where the money goes to?

You think the paper is free? You think the editors, typesetters etc are free? I'm not saying it should be as expensive as it is, I'm saying if you want to distribute for free, the publishing party (the research group) will have to pay more or the journal will have to take less profits.

Printing is a separate concern to modern publishing - if people want to read paper versions of academic work, they can foot the bill. Academic editors often work free for scientific publishers, and very few journals employ copy editors (though some do). Typesetting for the internet can be automated.

Nobody needs to pay more, but the publishers should certainly be making less profit. What really needs to happen is the publishers need to be replaced by more efficient ones. See for example Scholastica, who provide the entire journal infrastructure for $10/article. Or the PeerJ, charge just $99/year to publish with them.

Agree, but the publishers will only take those reduced profits if they feel threatened. So start with motivating scientists to choose open access journals if you want to do it the legal way. I don't understand why scientists first pick a journal that takes their rights to their paper away and then offer it for free via "secret codes". Seems to me they are supporting the current, closed system.

> I don't understand why scientists first pick a journal that takes their rights to their paper away and then offer it for free via "secret codes". Seems to me they are supporting the current, closed system.

The reason is that a scientist not doing this would (rightly or wrongly) have fewer publications in the 'best' journals as considered by the rest of their field and by impact and citation measurements, would therefore be less well known and well cited, and would struggle more to succeed. This is wrong and bad and so on, but it's probably widely true.

Online only is perfectly fine today. Also typesetting can be taken care of by authors + some scripts. Peer review is free.

Where the money goes to?

Ask PLoS, they charge $3k/article for open access publications. How much cheaper do you think Elsevier can be than PLoS?

> but the paper needs be printed and reviewed. This is not free

The reviewers work for free. Printing is almost free, and dispensable - nobody actually uses the printed journals and everyone prefers to print out PDFs themselves.

> I also don't like it but the paper needs be printed and reviewed. This is not free.

True, and in open access journals that cost is supported mostly by the authors: https://www.plos.org/publications/publication-fees/

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