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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

"I paid, before hand, to have a movie created, but was never allowed to watch it (for free)" isn't actually all that great a moral justification for pirating a movie, either. But in the case of creating a movie, if I paid to make it happen, first the creators would probably invite me to the first screening, and second, even if they didn't, I could afford to buy a ticket.

Scientific research, on the other hand, is paid for, not by "me", but by "us" - by the pooled tax money of millions of people. I, as an individual, do not have the money to "buy a ticket" to all the research that we, as a group, have paid for.

What really needs to happen is that we, the taxpayers, put pressure on the government to insist that all government-supported research publish the results for free online somewhere.

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>taxpayers should insist that government research publish results for free

Publishing in open journals costs significantly more (on the magnitude of thousands per paper) so this plan would likely require significant amounts of additional funding.

That is a significant and incredibly poorly defended assertion that you're making there, sir.

Given that there are dozens if not hundreds (possibly thousands) of open journals, many of which are heavily digitally based, well tied with distributed storage, and willing to work with any significant publication – the claim that "this plan would likely require significant amounts of additional funding" doesn't even pass the first smell test.

You don't just get to assert things without support. That's not only not good science, it's terrible argumentation.

Here's how you do a proper smell test - http://bfy.tw/4SY1

It's pretty obvious that there is a revenue stream that disappears when choosing open access over a paid viewing model.. To cover that - when an author publishes a paper and wants to use the open access model, they pay the journal. The costs come from administering peer review.

The true cost of publication is unknown - "Diane Sullenberger, executive editor for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC, says that the journal would need to charge about $3,700 per paper to cover costs if it went open-access. But Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief of Nature, estimates his journal's internal costs at £20,000–30,000 ($30,000–40,000) per paper. Many publishers say they cannot estimate what their per-paper costs are because article publishing is entangled with other activities" - also from [0].

[0] - http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-scie...

side note: I fully support open access, but using current publication system and open access would either push some costs on the scientists writing the papers which would be covered by taxpayers in the case of gov-funded research.

Another problem with open access journals is that they generally have lower impact factors. The impact factors of the journals you publish in play a big role in tenure and promotion decisions for professors.

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