“You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...

I know some people really want to make Disney play by everyone's rules, but they just have too much damn money and influence. At least they do tend to revive their old IP and not just let it sit there to rot indefinitely, like so many other companies.

Journals like Nature and Science are usually considered the top (at least for physics, which I studied). Getting even one article published in these is a big deal. As a grad student you've got it made for when you apply for a post doc.

The irony is that most (probably all) of the researchers would gladly want their articles shared widely, and I couldn't see any researcher in favour of restricting access to an interested party wanting to see their work.

That said, if you're not in academia, you may have good luck emailing professors directly asking if they can share a copy of their paper. I've been out of school for several years now, but professors sometimes even included such PDFs on their webpages for general public consumption. Not sure if that violates any terms of the publishing journal though.

A big part of success in modern scientific research is ability to secure funding, so if you put your thumbs on the scales enough, it could catalyze a move to open access journals as the "prestigious journals."

Imagine if every conference charged speakers for speaking, and in order to get promoted you had to speak at those conferences. It's the same thing. Except most software engineers are happy not paying to speak at conferences because their promo doesn't require it.

One of the major problem is that bibliometrics criteria are necessarily impacted by inertia of prestige, and publishers own the title of the most prestigious journals.

Older, tenured scientists could just go and stop publishing in those journals to build up the prestige of new (really) open access ones, but the fact is that most often they co-authors papers with their students or at least younger, un-tenured scientists, and they understandably don't want to sacrifice the careers of the new generation.

Some funding agencies now requires that work they fund are made open access, but sadly, publishers lobby in the US and in Bruxelles weight a lot in favor of "authors pay" model, and many funding agencies includes publishing budget in research grant for this reason. That is very frustrating because people mix up real open access with open access paid by authors, while 1- other economical models are possible (see my other comments on this page), and 2- countries and funding agencies could legally enforce that every papers published in a non-open access journal must be made available immediately in an open repository such as arXiv, overruling the decision of publishers who often put an embargo of e.g. 2 years before this can be done.

They are now selling the IP division that owns the Impact Factor. No news just yet (as far as I am aware) on who will end up buying it, but depending on who it is I could potentially see some backlash (finally) within academia if there's an unavoidable conflict of interest (ie if Elsevier buys it). That said, inertia is stronger than anyone wants to admit in academia, so I wouldn't be surprised if IF stays the dominant force in academic reputation for a long time to come. But maybe, just maybe, the time is right for the fall of Impact Factor.

Why not publish in both places ?

See for example http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/science/asap-bio-biologist...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIH_Public_Access_Policy

That's necessarily true. It's true that universities pay for journal subscriptions, but I guess a significant portion (or even all) of that expense is covered by the overheads universities charge grants. Given that a significant number of grants are taxpayer-paid, it's likely that tax payers are already paying for the journal subscriptions. So making them open access will shift the costs around, but it isn't immediately obvious that it will cost the taxpayers more than it currently does.

However, what's the extra cost in distributing the journal article? Hosting fees? A simple website where the paper author uploads a PDF? It seems like those costs are pretty small

If anything, it's 1% of the world. The problem is not limited to the US.

And it's a very significant 1% which is one of the biggest - if not literally the biggest - drivers of the world economy.

>The counter argument to this is you pay to use national parks even though you already pay for it.

Parks have huge continuing expenses. They're also owned in trust for the public.

Journal publishing has almost no expenses at all. It's pure privatised oligoply. It provides no useful public or private service of any kind.

There is nothing academic publishers do that couldn't be done better in other ways.

What's actually ludicrous is that you pay private, profit making companies to allow you to read taxpayer-funded research.

Moreover, taxpayer-funded bodies have to pay these companies to allow them to read taxpayer-funded research from other taxpayer-funded bodies. That is the epitome of private sector wastefulness spreading its tentacles into the public sector.

Of course, this whole argument implies that all the research produced is only being viewed by 1% of the population then much of it is worthless and never used, therefore the public funds put into using the research were largely wasted - which we know is definitely not true. And if only 1% of the population is viewing the material, then it seems a bit unlikely that it would be so highly profitable for people like Elsevier.

I mean, this argument breaks down even further because if even only 1% more people were to use the research because it was free, the benefit to society would be worth many orders of magnitude more than the funds that would have been gained from selling the material.

The final, fatal flaw in the argument, however is that the money paid into National Parks is given to the Government, who use it to pay for the upkeep of National Parks. The people who are charging to access research are doing so to make a profit and relying largely on research funded not by the publishers, but by the U.S. Government who give grants! They are hardly contributing their entire profits into research.

My fellow researchers firmly follow the, "citizens paid for it, we are gonna share it" mentality so all results and source material is made available for free online. if someone wants everything organized into a strict 10 page limit, they can have it, but they arent getting anything more than what everyone already has access too.

This analogy is completely wrong. The money you pay in admission to the parks go towards the parks in order to maintain and improve the parks, even though you already do that with your taxes.

The money you pay to scientific publications goes to the publisher alone, it does not, in any case, end up financing science.

You would have a case if the publishers did not make huge profits from the research and contribute nothing back to the research. When you pay for access to a park, you know that money is going towards the running and improvement of the park.

I've been presented with a "We see you're using an ad blocker ... please turn it off" message (I can't recall where, perhaps Bloomberg or the WSJ?) when I've just had a Hosts file in play.

I also know that my access guarantees other researches access to the same content, meaning the research that they do, that may one day benefit me down the road, has had free access to all of the knowledge available to make the best play at their own research.

It's scary to me that scientific knowledge can be locked away. I am the kind of person that believes all pharmaceutical research should be freely published and publicly available as well. Patents provide all the monopoly protections necessary, and sunlight helps disinfect bogus science that sometimes leads to death in the pursuit of profits.

>Plain and simple

Huh?

It takes an intellectually advanced society to understand another intellectually advanced nation.

If science produced in the US was actually superior, demand for US scientists would sky-rocket globally.

US education would have higher value.

And other countries will try to match the US in science funding.

This assumes, of course, science done in other countries also becomes freely available. But why do I care who advances science, if the advances (or, at least the knowledge) are available to humans at large?

This is notwithstanding top secret scientific research, which is just loaded with nuance. But we're not discussing that today.

A good part, roughly on par with Europe, Japan, Russia, and China (number of papers is hardly a measure of scientific production anyway):

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/20k5dk/top...

Does that mean that the US tax payer should be the major contributor to an hypothetical worldwide scientific activity?

All tax payers on this planet (at least those living in a country with sizeable research spending) already contribute to the worldwide scientific knowledge. I believe this is a good thing.

[edit: typo]

What publishers offered was delivering paper versions of articles to your local research library. Now they only host PDFs online. Apart from that their added-value work is negligible. The biggest improvement I've seen by a publisher of one of my papers was changing "Sec." to "Sect." when I was referencing section, and putting page number in blue rather than black (true story).

Anyway nowadays when a paper is accessible directly from a public repository, it is that version which will be used most often, and it includes literally zero work from the publisher.

All the real work is done by the authors, and by the reviewers, who are other researchers doing their normal job (i.e., they're not paid specifically to review papers, and more importantly not paid by publishers).

The only thing that publishers provide is reputation/prestige, and that's only because of inertia, and it's difficult to change because they own the titles of journals they publish. That's one of the numerous reasons why bibliometrics is an entirely bad idea and is counter-productive for science.

Also, not all open access journal are charging author, that is a lie installed by publishers lobbying (and this is how they actually spend money). You can research "diamond open access" or "overlay journal" for some examples of economical models where journal are high quality, open access and free to submit to.