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Comment by anonymousDan | Hacker News Reader

Why on earth do people think this is to the detriment of publishers? This will effectively just lock in their profits by forcing all eu grants to include the cost of payments to publishers to make research papers open access. It just means the taxpayer is now paying for open access instead of individuals having to pay up themselves. Note I'm not saying this is a bad thing, and it is possibly worth publicly subsidising this as an intermediate step, but it is far from being one in the eye for publishers as other comments here seem to think.

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Publisher-hosted open access is a scam.

Here in the UK we already have an open-access requirement for RCUK and EPSRC grants, but it can be met by uploading a preprint to an institution- or subject-specific repository (such as arXiv) and including a link to it in your report back to the grant sponsor.

Last time I published in a journal, I got a "special offer" of $1200 instead of $2000 to make it open access. I politely rejected the offer - it's already online for $0, just hosted by the university itself.

This makes me feel stupid, but people get paid when they publish in journals?

No. The "special offer" was for the publication fee. Major publishers have decided that they can charge extra for open access papers.

They charge extra, because making it open-access prevents them from charging readers as they would normally do.

I believe he is referring to the normal price for publishing it as open access being 2k, but their current deal reduces it to 1.2k

However you shouldn't feel stupid. The wording is, as English often is, confusing to those without context.

That's the price journals ask to make a paper open access.

Edit: oh my, three+ comments at the same time.

This doesn't make any sense, why would they make you pay less to make it open access? You mean it was 1200$ more?

They where only going to charge 1200$ to make it open access instead of charging 2,000$.

To be sure everyone understand you correctly:

– "normal" publishing (behind a paywall) is free for authors,

– the open access option was set arbitrarily to $2000 by the publisher, and they decided to offer a discount at $1200 instead.

That's about right.

(For conferences with proceeedings, even normal publishing is not free - part of the conference fee is to pay the publisher.)

I still don't understand. Is pablo's correct? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12439402

Yes. They where only going to charge 1200$ to make it open access instead of their normal charge of 2,000$ to make it open access.

This is from May, but the commitment is welcome none the less. As other comments mention there are plenty of ways for academic papers to be free to read and for us to still have a broken system.

In the UK, 'green route' or self-archiving means that, after a moratorium, you can put your paper on your institution's website. The moratorium could be three years, so it's still highly restrictive and locks in commercial publishers' profits.

My view is that a 'knowledge commons' system could easily work. Wikipedia apparently spends $50 million in total. I believe a similar amount of funding would easily support an academic publishing ecosystem in which publishing and reading are free.

I present some more detail here: https://medium.com/@jimmytidey/designing-knowledge-commons-t...

It does however provide a limit on how much money each publisher can extract from a paper, and makes things far more transparent.

It also makes free or cheaper services more competitive.

Good point. However, at some point publishers are going to up their charges, e.g. because of inflation. How will the cost increases be negotiated? Between the funding bodies and publishers behind closed doors? Or will they be imposed unilaterally by publishers, forcing academics to limit their submissions to pay-for open-access journals? This will bring into conflict the need for academics to publish in top venues to ensure career progression and the budget limitations posed by finding bodies. I suppose this could give momentum to the move towards completely free open access journals, but I'm sceptical given the risks for academics in not publishing at top venues. And although they get a hard time, I do believe there are some costs involved in running a journal despite all the free work they currently get from scientists, so I'm not sure completely free journals are realistic either anyway.

I'm not sure if there are any more details available yet, but I would worry about this turning into even more of a gravy train for publishers. I can't see for example the Dutch government being in any hurry to introduce any legislation that will threaten Elsevier's viability.

Nonetheless it is still a positive step that scientific findings look like becoming more readily accessible for the general public.

> It does however provide a limit on how much money each publisher can extract from a paper.

Why should we accept publishers to decide on what this limit should be? Currently it can be as high as $5000. For hosting a PDF. This is a total waste of (mostly public) money.

> It also makes free or cheaper services more competitive.

No because as long as we permit to those publishers to exists and exercise their copyrights on prestigious journal title, their is a big inertia that incentivize researchers to publish with the publishers that hold the prestigious journal.

That's why we also need to get rid of bibliometrics for evaluating researchers for their career. Bibliometrics is the game of the publishers, and coincidentally, the biggest bibliometrics tools are made and sold by… publishers.

> Why should we accept publishers to decide on what this limit should be? Currently it can be as high as $5000. For hosting a PDF. This is a total waste of (mostly public) money.

I'm not sure there's a good way of limiting how much companies are allowed to charge for a service.

What the funding bodies can do, however, is limit the amount of money in a grant that can be spent on publishing costs. That's far easier.

> No because as long as we permit to those publishers to exists and exercise their copyrights on prestigious journal title, their is a big inertia that incentivize researchers to publish with the publishers that hold the prestigious journal.

There is a big inertia, but currently the system makes big journals just as financially attractive as small journals or free places to publish because there's no upfront cost. If big journals cost a lot of money and small/free journals don't, then there's actually a force pushing towards cheaper options. It changes the customer to one that has more control (the funding body).

There are interesting initiatives like the Wellcome Trust's project: http://wellcomeopenresearch.org/

I'm also not sure what you're suggesting with "exercise their copyrights on prestigious journal title".

> Bibliometrics is the game of the publishers, and coincidentally, the biggest bibliometrics tools are made and sold by… publishers.

I think this comes from the fact that the metadata around publications is unfortunately often not available in a decent form, and the people who actually have the data that's necessary for analysing these kinds of things is publishers, so anyone who wants to do certain types of analysis will benefit from either being in or partnering with a publisher.

[disclaimer, working with article and grant data is what I do at Digital Science]

> I'm not sure there's a good way of limiting how much companies are allowed to charge for a service.

That of course depends on one's subjective notion of "good". There are multiple ways of doing it. I like the one you suggest if the amount we are talking about is a round zero.

> I'm also not sure what you're suggesting with "exercise their copyrights on prestigious journal title".

If the members of a journal's scientific board decide they want to go full real open access (with no costs for readers nor authors), they have to abandon to name of the journal and the associated impact factor and reputation that they build together with their work over the years, because the publisher owns the journal even though it is the board members who did all the work (as part of their job as researchers, paid by the state or a uni for example, not by the publisher).

That's one of the reseaons why the movement for open access and the movement against the use of bibliometrics should unite.

Thanks for the disclaimer.

On the contrary, I think publishers have a lot to be worried about because this is a first step toward ending the legacy publishing model. Since journal publishers are middlemen that add almost no actual value to the publication process, their revenue stems from access control to published content. The new law removes a large amount of future content from their control, making them more reliant on open access fees. If other countries follow the EU's lead then eventually we will reach a critical mass of open content where the subscription model is no longer tenable. At such a point, stakeholders would be confronted with the obvious question: "Why are we paying a publishing company--which relies on volunteer authors, peer reviewers, and editors--to upload this content to the internet for free?". The next step is collective action to bypass the big publishers altogether, such as restricting grant money from going toward open access fees.

Clearly you - and many people commenting here - have no idea how the business model works and keep making these comments of: "don't mess with the free market."

Explained in a very simple way:

- Researchers do the heavy work, carrying out the research and writing up the articles: they don't get a cent from publishers (sometimes they even have to pay to publish).

- Reviewers, since of the most knowledgeable researchers in the area, take their time and knowledge to check what the researchers did: they also don't get a cent from publishers.

- Publishers, get all the work already done and charge money - stupid amounts of money like 30eur per article - to let other researchers see the works.

Researchers have nothing to lose by cutting the publisher. We are not wasting any money - on the contrary - for demanding free access.

Seriously, people should stop commenting themes they simply don't have a clue about.

One way or the other, to the extent that there will be a cost associated, it is going to be borne by taxpayers in open access (in fact, the taxpayers in the richest countries will probably subsidize the research of the poorer ones during collaboration).

But your point is very true - at some point we need the top publishers to be thrown out of business and for new ones to emerge AND the new publishers need to maintain costs which reflect true costs rather than the current 'what can we get away with?' prices they charge. Strangely, competition will be really good for this situation but it will not be so great for the researchers. (It would be like determining the quality of a webpage when no website has a PageRank higher than 3). Isn't that why there is so much hair pulling over this issue amongst researchers?

Isn't this ruling going to at least help a little in the sense that the researches now have a legal reason to push back on publishers who charge the exorbitant rates, plus as the sibling comment says, introduces a bit more transparency into the process?

I am interested in getting your thoughts on how to kickstart more competition amongst publishers.

Honestly, if academics still choose to pay the established journals thousands to host single pdfs, they're paying for the brand. If schools still choose to subscribe to those journals when all of the papers in them are available for free, they're paying for the brand. The publishers legitimately own the brand.

The goal is for all public scientific research to be available to the public for free, not to smash middle-men. If your goal is to smash middle-men, you'll be smashing all day and all night for the rest of your life, and middle-men are generally better at smashing than you are.

Also, if you look at your job, you may be a middle-man yourself. Most upper middle-class people are.

I'm not sure about that. Where I currently live we now have a regulation that we need to put every article open access on some server, while at the same time providing us with no guarantee or assistance that journals won't sue us. Meanwhile, journals keep requesting copyright transfer agreements.

Basically, our government currently forces us to commit copyright infringement or to end our careers and funding by not publishing in established journals.

In the good old spirit of our country, nobody does anything and the open access servers remain empty until the higher authorities get a basic grasp of the publishing reality. People are used to incompetent bosses around here.

It also means that researchers have to think about the cost of publishing which they before haven't. This should create a downward pressure on prize/upward pressure on quality by the publishers.

By a law that declares the reproduction of Scientific Articles a permitted use.

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