Hacker News Reader

Comment by untilHellbanned | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. It needs to start with the funding agencies, NIH, Wellcome Trust, HHMI, etc. Like the Gates Foundation recently did, they need to make it a requirement that you must publish in immediate open-access journals. I'd further like to see the journal not getting as onerous copyright claim but baby steps.

The people with the money need to put their money where the public interest's mouth is. Certainly not where Elsevier's mouth is.

View on HN

This won't work. The only way is the hiring committees don't judge the candidates' work on which journal published. But at as dire as the current job market nobody will have the time to go through this tedious task.

Nope. The chicken and the egg starts where the money starts. If all the candidates' papers are in immediate open access journals (like the Gates Foundation is mandating soon and hopefully NIH will follow), then hiring committees won't have vanity journals as the signal.

I've read somewhere that the funding agencies fear that less scientists will use their funding money if they have such requirements. No idea what the source was, but could this be one of the reasons they are reluctant?

Care to elaborate? That doesn't make much sense to me. Scientists can't do their jobs without funding, so what alternatives do they have?

You would think this. But actually institutes can be quite selective about what grants they take. (Usually the individual researcher would take whatever they can get)

The biggest example has to do with the NIH "indirect rate". The system, incredibly, is set up so that the larger a proportion of an institute's funding comes from NIH, the more money per grant goes to the institution. "Indirect" refers to the fact that each grant comes with "direct costs" that go to the scientist and "indirect costs" that goes to the institute, and the "indirect rate" determines the amount, expressed as a percentage of grant direct costs, that goes to the institute. This dumb system results in institutes discouraging their own investigators from applying for non-NIH grants.

At my institute if you take a non-NIH grant you have to actually "pay back the difference" in lost funding for the institute that is caused by non-NIH grants lowering the institute's indirect rate.

I specifically referred to NIH as one the funding agencies that needs to take a leadership role for publishing policy. So this comment isn't super relevant to my original comment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com