What exact work these publishers are doing? How much are they demanding for that? Who is funding the research? Who is doing the work?
These publishers are just mean middlemen who are trying to extract as much money as they can/want from both the authors and the readers. Now is the time to get rid of them.
Typesetting, third party review, offering visibility in a high quality journal?
The point is nothing is stopping scientists from publishing in other, open source journals. But they don't. That means these journals offer something of value to them.
Prestige, obviously.
The other services are marginally valuable. Honestly, I wish a big foundation would agree to simply underwrite any such costs (to remove these as an objection).
The whole value of publishers is in their accumulated brand value. A brand value which they did not build themselves but instead gathered from decades of harvesting public resources.
It does? I'm genuinely curious. The vast majority of research is funded with public money (to some extent).
Where is all this publicly-funded research published?
Now, there is a delay (1 year?) between when it's published in a journal and when it's freely released, which I can understand bothers people, but it does eventually make it's way out to the public domain.
That was just an example link.
Why some arbitrary figure like $100M? why not $1M or $1K or for that matter even $1?
It should be other way round, if any research gets any funding (even $1 or 1 cent) then also the papers coming out of that research should be immediately released to public else they should not accept that grant/funding. The journals should not get a free ride for 1 year or so.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Access_to_Science_and_T...
Trivial
>third party review
Trivial, and happens just fine without publisher "help"
>offering visibility in a high quality journal?
Most journals are not "high quality." They're often very niche efforts, sometimes started and run as an easy way to get publication credits outside the handful of prestige publications.
Ambitious academics know that one way to raise your profile is to organise your own conference - and ask a publisher to collect and print the proceedings for you.
Obviously that's your opinion, but since when does the effort it takes to create something matter about the price? It's pretty trivial to move product from a factory to a retail store, yet people have no problem paying for that.
And again, if it's trivial, then there is nothing stopping anyone from starting their own journal. But amazingly, nobody has done that.
What's the saying about "find out why the fence is there before you tear it down"?
Most journals are not "high quality.
Who cares about most journals? Nobody reads them anyways. I'm talking Nature, Science, etc.
Absolutely not and there are plenty of examples. If I buy land and find oil underneath, it's zero effort for me to rake in the dollars. If I come up with a super complex device that takes me 1 year to build, the price is zero if no one wants it.
Price is driven by supply and demand.
You should know they are sometimes called "Tabloid journals" for a reason. Actual 'high-quality' or 'flagship' journals are most the most part unknown outside their discipline.
Elsevier seems keen to not have third parties review the publications.
And visibility, same thing. They try to prevent it.
Yes, scientists should publish elsewhere; the contracts currently prevent them as Elsevier has power to stop them through their entrenched legacy position.
The effect of Impact Factor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor) in academic grants is ridiculously high.
So in the end it's not the scientists who can make the switch. It's the people who pay the scientists.
Tell your representatives the following: The clerks that you have put in charge of funding our tax-money-filled purses for scientific research are just a bunch of uneducated or worse yet ill-educated fellows who do not understand even an iota of academics especially in the STEM areas. So they just rely on a bunch of very coarse proxy numbers (e.g. shitty impact factors) to decide funding. So please remove these clerks from these positions. We can and must install a better and more open system for reviewing where well known scientists/academicians can be invited to participate in the decision making process. Open access journals is one such great way to start. See what is being done by great academicians like Prof. Sir Timothy Gowers and Prof. Donald Knuth are doing for this cause [1], [2]. You may contact these people and get their advice in this matter.
Signed.
Your fellow citizen, a concerned taxpayer and a voter of USA.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Gowers#Elsevier_boycot...
The journals offer something of value because they provide high-quality taxpayer-funded research. The publisher is nothing more than a middleman, who should be cut out of the equation.
Journals do publish a lot of work by academicians, many of them funded, in the US, by NSF grants (taxpayer money).