We've failed: open access is winning and we must change our approach | Hacker News Reader

We've failed: open access is winning and we must change our approach

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

626 pointsmathgenius377 comments

The content distribution problem is capital-s Solved. The reason why publishers are floundering is because their product doesn't add value anymore.

As a group they have slowly been cutting out all the value-adds and buckling down on only one thing: distribution. Distribution is not valuable anymore because distribution has no marginal cost. This is classic rent-seeking. Cut your costs so far that your business does nothing, nothing except extract rent out of a pre-existing monopoly. This lasts exactly as long as it takes the market to make a competitor.

How do you win against free? Be better than free.

Agreed. My experience with academic publishing is in the humanities, not sciences, but over the last 15 years I've seen the quality of editorial work go way down at publishers I worked with, and increasing burden placed on the authors to do work that should be the publisher's job like exact typesetting and layout, as the publishers do anything they can to slash staff costs. A year or two ago I did an article with an Oxford University Press publication and the copy editor mistook a Latin book title for German and offered some nonsensical change based on that. It used to be that OUP staff had such a depth of linguistic knowledge that they themselves offered valuable feedback to authors. Now it appears to be a purely mechanical (and largely "offshored") process for them of pushing text through a pipeline to produce cash from captive markets (university libraries). As their prestige and monopolies wane, these publishers have to be able to offer authors some tangible benefit.

My experience in science has been the same. I used to look at high quality publications and made it a goal of mine to have my own. Recently I delivered a number of high-quality figures in a vector format for use in a publication. I made especially sure that the text and line widths were appropriate for the document. When I saw the final version of the paper I was quite upset. Not only was the main text riddled with typos and inconsistencies (thanks to having multiple authors), the figures were rendered at low resolution in both print and PDF versions. I mean literally visible pixels on a printed page. So my work was distributed in a lower quality than my own PhD thesis.

But the reason we still use these publishers is simple and we all know it. Many people are happy to complain about publishers but nobody is happy to take the hit on their own CV. You shouldn't use publishers for the above reasons, but did you see my latest Impact Factor XX paper in Journal You Have Heard Of?

Also sad is that recent republication of classic book titles and too much publication of new niche works is done print-on-demand, with poor quality paper, poor printing, and very flimsy binding. If I’m going to spend $100 for a new book, I want something that was printed on a real press, with real binding.

I tried buying a few reissued historical mathematics books published by Chelsea (now owned by the AMS) and I could have gotten a better output by taking the Internet Archive’s scan to my local copy shop. I quickly returned them and looked online for a used original.

It makes me also not want to buy recent editions of e.g. Springer mathematics books: the technical content may be great, but the binding falls off and the figures all look like crap. It’s a hard choice whether to buy a used 15 year old copy with various technical errors sprinkled throughout, or a poorly made recent edition with corrections and an extra chapter or two.

> Also sad is that recent republication of classic book titles and too much publication of new niche works is done print-on-demand, with poor quality paper, poor printing, and very flimsy binding. If I’m going to spend $100 for a new book, I want something that was printed on a real press, with real binding.

Producer prices for printing have long been increasing much quicker than general inflation for a long time, so either lower quality or higher prices for the end product is a natural consequence.

Any sources on this? What is driving costs?

Can you clarify? There are sites with print-your-own support and produce good binding on quality paper at good prices. Why cannot commercial publishers do this?

So many new books on Amazon are bad quality reprints.

Certain subjects depend on quality, clear illustrations.

I just assumed a new book meant quality of the original, but I was wrong.

Years ago, when I was learning watch repair, I bought a new copy of The Watch Repairer's Manual, by Henry Fried. Published by the American Watchmaker's Press. It wasen't cheap then either.

As I was reading it, the diagrams seemed fuzzy. I thought it was just me though. I'm a first edition collector, and have a huge library. You would think I would have spotted a bad printing run.

Well, I happened to buy the same book off eBay, but was published in 1973. The pages, and illustrations were crisp, and clear.

I learned my lesson though. It's a clever way to sell a new book. My lesson was don't trust new book anywhere. Used, old print is fine by me.

New is not better when it comes to certain books. In the back of my mind, I wondered how anyone could offer a new copy of an obscure book. Well, it's by inferior printing.

There's a market for quality reprints of certain books. We like to think we made so much progress, but not when it comes to printing books. We have regressed. Pick up any magazine from the 40's through the 70's, and you will notice the quality difference. I'm not saying we need to go back to Linotype printing. Im just saying we have regressed in printing.

(My grandfather was a completely color blind printer. He went his whole career never telling anyone. He was laser focused on the print quality, or "tack sharp" as he used to say. Yes--completely color blind. He would ask his coworkers, customers if the colors looked right. He would then make color adjustments. His best advice to me was moderation in everything. This was coming from a 3 pack/day smoker, eight drink minimum, with a 1/2 hose feeding his lower extremities due to plaque. He lived until 80. Crazy?)

> So many new books on Amazon are bad quality reprints.

Is it possible that what you'd bought was a counterfeit? Amazon apparently has a problem with knock-offs being commingled with their publisher-supplied stock. Here's the founder of No Starch Press tweeting about Amazon selling counterfeit copies of Python For Kids. The diagrams were fuzzy & pixelated (and black and white), and the paper quality was significantly inferior:

https://twitter.com/billpollock/status/844030960333152256

There was an HN discussion about it 6 months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13924546

> Certain subjects depend on quality, clear illustrations... the diagrams seemed fuzzy. I thought it was just me though. I'm a first edition collector, and have a huge library.

This is exactly the kind if situation where digital hi-res screens and zoomable vector diagrams as presentation formats are immensely superior to paper print. You're a collector and hence holding on to print editions because of nostalgia. We're however hobbled from evolving high quality modern documentation by being tired to "printability" like pdfs and Tex

Literally why TeX exists. Donald Knuth couldn't tolerate the poor quality of digital typesetting.

And don't forget all the really nasty political things going on in the backstage of big 3 journals (Nature, Science & Cell). Big PIs often reach agreements with editors before writing their papers.

I guess anything is possible but I doubt that those journals, who depend so much on their perception of quality would so easily compromise it. If this is confirmed it would be a business disaster for them.

What to me would sound less unlikely (and I am totally on the outside of all of this), if PIs take into account editor's interests and preferences -- that is, if you know that editor is interested in topic A (say, oxygen on exoplanets) you might lean in that direction with the paper you hope to publish there (e.g., in abstract / intro / conclusion stress how your research supports existence or lack thereof of oxygen). Also not impossible to know if an issue is dedicated to a specific grand theme, so articles on that have a significantly higher acceptance chance.

Whether this is 100% kosher or not can be debated, but this is far, far off from agreements that a journal will publish whatever a specific researcher writes.

By nature (ahem), editors of these journals are responsible for what goes in their pages. Decisions of what to run have some motive - you can call them "political," or "profit-driven." But this has always been there. If an editor thinks your research isn't in the cutting edge, it won't get published. There used to be an override mechanism (in PNAS, Academy members could recommend others' papers for review).

If you need anecdotal examples, I'm sure we can provide some :)

Say what? Could you elaborate?

Citations?

Well I can't cite anything, I'm just talking about my experience and things I've seen first hand many many times.

If you're a PI on a big project or heading a big group, it's routine business to meet journal editors, invite them to your lab and reach publication agreements before writing your paper.

Obviously the paper will still go to review. But even that is already a big hurdle you have bypassed. In the big 3 journals, it's equally tough to get to review than to pass reviews once there. Plus, with direct contact to the editor, it's easier to get your paper reviewed by friendlier peers and/or influence ultimate editorial decisions.

This is true in my experience as well - most papers to these vanity journals are rejected without review by the editor ("desk reject"), and a prior relationship between a PI and the editor basically guarantees you will sail past that stage.

Hmm sounds similar to the prisoner's dilemma problem/tragedy of the commons.

Sorry about your experience. One thing I want to say is that the quality of material put out by University Press publishers is head and shoulders above anything you’d usually find in Barnes and Noble while not insanely expensive like the $125 books Springer Publishing sells.

University Press type publishers have always targeted upmarket since the 1970’s, when a wave of consolidation and focus on short-term profits squeezed those books out of regular publishing.

So many books are written by idiot business consultants with nothing to say. Think Randi Zuckerberg but maybe not as bad. University Presses, to my eternal gratitude, do not seem to have this problem yet and all their books say something worth saying.

Sorry to go on that rant, but just wanted to stick up a little bit forOxford University Press, which publishes the amazing “Very Short Introduction” series btw.

Also would like to say your point is still valid. I’ve heard the same thing about the music industry. When you go to a label, they expect you to already have a marketing plan...weird

This is an interesting perspective. For a few years, I've worked as a volunteer to process authors' PDF files for some larger conferences to place on our open access site. My job is to add a conference banner to the top of the first page, add PDF metadata, and re-stamp the page numbers at the bottom.

Having a dedicated editor would definitely improve the quality of the results. You wouldn't believe what authors do to their PDF files before submission. I've seen papers that center an 8x11" copy of their paper in the middle of an A4 canvas. I've seen papers where all the pages are just giant bitmaps that show the paper (presumably to avoid plagiarism). I've seen papers that have incorrectly-embedded fonts, so after our pipeline, we didn't notice that all the text in figures was replaced by Chinese characters (sorry!). I've seen papers that have permuted font maps, so even though the paper looks correct on the screen, the letters on the OCR layer don't match what you see, making the work impossible to find on Google.

Not to complain against the authors. We all have to break out our LaTeX tricks minutes before the submission deadline to fix that weird compile bug. My point is that it's important to have _some_ oversight. It's not enough to just zip up all the PDF files and call that "open access."

Be better than free? Exactly on point.

The reason I stopped pirating music wasn't because I thought there was anything wrong with it.

I stopped pirating music because services like spotify have so many value adds for such a low monthly cost that it makes sense to use their services rather than pirate.

Spotify offered something better than free.

It's time for industries that haven't caught up with the times to start rethinking their business model. Opinions on IP aside, piracy is going nowhere and trying to fight the pirates based on ethics is futile.

>I stopped pirating music because services like spotify have so many value adds for such a low monthly cost that it makes sense to use their services rather than pirate.

That's good and all, but we can imagine a volunteer-run service that's just as good or better than Spotify -- but it's based on piracy. We could also imagine it reaching the pinnacle or convenience, so nothing else could be added except marginal improvements.

Would that make using it OK -- that there's no other paid alternative that's more convenient?

In the end somebody got to pay the artists both for the production costs and for making a living on top of them. And I don't say every artist deserves money just because they are an artist -- but every artist that people actually listen to they work does deserve a cut for that.

Whether it's OK is the wrong question. The right question is what people do, which is largely unrelated.

You can talk about how artists need to be paid until the end of time, but that won't change people's behavior much.

>Whether it's OK is the wrong question. The right question is what people do, which is largely unrelated.

We don't ask that for many other moral dilemmas -- we consider certain things unacceptable and try to stomp them even if people "do them". Why should it be the relevant question for music distribution?

Here's a moral question put the other way round. Do you think libraries are a good thing?

We now have the technology to make available the great majority of human knowledge and culture to a vast amount of humanity for free. I'd call that a very positive state both for the people receiving it and the benefits it would bring to the world.

And the only thing stopping us is that certain people would like to be paid. It's the same argument with cheap generic drugs for the third world. At some point you have to incentivise research. But also, at some point you have to consider the benefits to the rest of society too.

We do exactly that for every moral dilemma when the question is what companies need to do to survive.

There's nothing wrong when discussing the morality of piracy, but it's irrelevant when the topic at hand is what media distributors should do in order to make money.

Imagine a convenience store which experiences so much theft that it loses money, and they're trying to figure out what to change to save the store. Is it useful in that context to state that "theft is immoral"?

Copyright is not about morality. Nobody has a fundamental human right to prevent others from copying their work. Intellectual property is a legal fiction that we maintain as a means to encourage creative activities.

Copyright is basically a subsidy to content creators. Just like any other government subsidy, it should be adjusted periodically to balance its benefits against any drawbacks.

There is no question of morality here, only a question of effectiveness -- is a subsidy really needed, and if so, how much?

In practice we're talking about large, wealthy multinational corporations. I'm not convinced a moral argument is appropriate when one side of the transaction has no morals, in the traditional sense.

It might when creators stop creating - which, arguably, is already happening.

There aren't many people arguing that the 2010s have been a better decade for music than the 60s to 90s.

Of course, this assumes consumers and content distributors can join the dots - and so far there isn't much evidence they can.

Artists are labor for labels, if labels figured out how to get paid better, the vast majority of their artists would not be paid much better. The point of the label in a for profit system is to capture value by intermediating between producers and consumers. Musicians by themselves are often very poor at capturing economic value.

Since the producers are obligated to maximize profits for their shareholders under most corporate structures by supreme court decisions, their focus will be to reduce labor costs while maximizing total revenue from consumers.

There are no winners here except the distributors. Some kind of artist cooperative is a necessity. Then at least the smaller creators will get paid fairly.

It's also worth noting that part of the reason the UK has/had such a vibrant music scene is the dole. That is, they pay their artists to let them do their thing.

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/money-are-y...

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art-and-design/role-of-th...

Creators haven't stopped creating at all. The reason that people look back on earlier decades as agolden age is that then there was comparatively so little music produced that various demographics could broadly agree on a canon of "great bands/albums". These days, there is so much music being produced that groups of people -- even if they share a similar background -- might have no overlap in what they are listening to.

On the contrary, this is a great time for music of all kinds.

Right now, I'm following maybe 10 or so artists on social media, youtube, bandcamp, etc.

I pay a handful of them $1-$10 a month via patreon in return for them releasing their music for free via youtube (I generally also get clean, high quality versions out of this).

There's another handful I follow who release albums on Bandcamp and I can listen, and if I like it I can pay $5-$10 to download and keep forever.

I don't use Spotify or similar services, but my friends who do tell me about a huge world of similar small artists and variety of tastes they discovered through that service.

The music industry no longer takes a few select artists and makes them superstars everyone has heard of, yes. But in return there's something for everyone, and lots of artists making ends meet rather than a few artists getting rich. I think this is a net positive.

I agree that we as a society should make sure that artists can make a living. But I am honestly not sure an open-access approach to music would be any worse financially. Historically, the recording industry was one of the most exploitative. You can find a hundred stories of bands that sell a lot of records only to see barely-getting-by money in return. You can find a thousand stories of modest-selling bands getting totally screwed.

Things are now in a great turmoil, so we're still seeing where this goes. But I think it's no accident that Patreon was started by an independent musician. They expect to pay out $150m this year to artists. What do patrons get in exchange? Basically nothing. They just like supporting people doing good work.

I agree the morality of pure piracy is not so great. But the notion of piracy itself is rooted in a specific and entirely artificial theory of ownership, plus an industrial model built around that. The morality of that industrial model is in practice not so great either.

Things like Patreon and Wikipedia suggest that the morality of the commons is one that could work well in practice. It has its issues, but I don't think they're a priori greater than the historical alternative. Especially if it's supplemented with the sorts of things that Kevin Kelly describes as "better than free": http://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/

Maybe the Payment Request API will help? https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/

I'd start with why this is illegal in the first place.

In the US this comes from the copyright clause of the constitution.

"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."

The problem this was trying to solve was how do you incentivize people to create in order to 'promote the progress of science and useful arts' for the public's benefit. Limited time monopolies are the means to get to the overall goal of promoting the progress of science and useful art for the public's benefit.

Originally this limited time was 14 years with the ability to renew (once for 28 years max) - it also wasn't automatic and had to be registered. Today it's automatic and 75 years after the death of the creator (or 95 years for contract work) and even worse this change was retroactive. The retroactive change isn't within the original spirit of the law since people don't need to be incentivized to create something they've already created. You also can't opt out of it for works you've created, the best you can do is permissively license something (just stating 'this is public domain' doesn't do anything).

Not only does this lead to problems with orphan works, but massive amounts of culturally relevant material is now off limits for new people to create with - this inhibits new work except under the narrowly defined free use exceptions. Inhibiting progress of science and useful arts is the opposite of the original intent.

Copyright law today has mutated into protecting the profit of the rights holders and extending the length indefinitely, but only by a handful of years at a time so the supreme court can't rule it unconstitutional since it's technically a 'limited time'.

All of this was never intended to stop not for profit sharing of content and the law does a lot more bad than good - we want the minimum limited time restriction to encourage creation for the public benefit, not years after the death of the creator so the family and subsidiary companies can profit forever.

In the case of the journals it's even worse since they're exploiting the researcher's need for prestige and blocking access to publicly funded research. It's a corrupting influence on science and incentivizes scientists not to cooperate. These journals hold science back and offer no real benefit - maybe scihub will actually force them to provide value, but even if it kills them everyone will be better off.

You can look at this picture: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Tom_Bell... to see what's going on with copyright. To me, this looks like clear abuse of the law - it can't be that you needed 25 years to promote progress of science in 19th century but you need 100 years now. It's clear rent-seeking, no wonder people fail to believe the moralistic preaching of the same people who buy the laws that are convenient to them.

I think part of the difficulty is that the copyright clause argument is more nuanced to fully explain. It's easier for rights holders to loudly argue that people are stealing content and ignore the original intent of the law.

This is further complicated by rights holders having enormous amounts of money they can use to influence legislation.

It typically all comes back to the campaign finance reform Lawrence Lessing talks about in Republic Lost. I think Copyright was one of the original issues that lead to his core argument of a corrupting influence on modern US politics. Specifically the issue with the journals was what drove Aaron Swartz to try and export them all (probably to make something like scihub, but he never got there).

The copyright law is absurd in the context of scientific publication. Here's why. The private property associated with the publication is created at the moment of publication, and is the association with the author's name. It is this association with publication which undergirds lifetime tenure, or reputation leading to employment, a cash flow which when discounted can be worth many millions of dollars. The investigator author knows this and the publisher knows this. The author gets permanent monopoly rights due to the association. It's remarkable. Unless the publication is proven wrong, the name association can last centuries. That's why I say many millions of dollars in the case of a significant publication, especially, pre-tenure.

Now the publisher knows this too, and tries to assert monopoly rights, using the skirts of copyright law, over a certain time frame, in the vending of images of the publication. It's ridiculous how little value he's added. And when you examine who paid for the research or work in question, it's a racket. Third world baksheesh is certainly less injurious to progress.

It also seems interesting to imagine a system or volunteer driven piracy that ends up giving artists a bigger cut than the Spotify model, which mostly gives them a pittance.

There's a huge crisis of compensation for "content creators", and Spotify does not seem like the hundred year solution. Especially seeing how it keeps maintaining an artificial distinction between producers and consumers and acts as a filter for what counts as music.

The Spotify model is arguably more successful _because_ they pay artists so little. I don't buy music much anymore. Pandora and Spotify satisfy most of my desire for it.

>The Spotify model is arguably more successful _because_ they pay artists so little.

That's a non sequitur.

That's not applicable to papers though, because the authors are either not paid by the journals or pay the publisher.

The questions Wiley are dancing around are "what does the publisher actually do" and "is anyone, author or reader, prepared to pay for that".

Have you heard of Pinkapp? This may seem unrelated, but it's a prostitution app. The founder seems to have a sense of design and an extremely healthy sense of keeping himself safe via Tor. I grilled him a bit on his opsec and it was clear he's competent. If he's even a he.

I think if people can develop Tinder + Buy It Now with no repercussions, questions like "is it okay?" cease being useful. The question of morality goes out the window.

> I think if people can develop Tinder + Buy It Now with no repercussions

That's a big if; repercussions for prostitution listing services, even with basically zero opsec, tend not to be immediate, and pinkapp hasn't gotten big yet.

From pinkapp.io:

> On top of this, we will allow shareholders to opt into hidden ownership to allow them to remain fully anonymous. In such cases, we can distribute profits via Monero or other methods.

Is this legal?

It's not, but the founder of Pinkapp believes they can operate outside of the legal system.

I hope their opsec is on point.

Moral/ethical issues of piracy aside, your final point of musicians earning a living just isn't a good analogy for academic publishing. None of the traditional or open access fees goes to the authors, so sci-hub or not, it makes no financial difference to the author. Mostly salaries come from the university and research grants, which in fact include money to pay for open access fees that the publishers are charging.

Popcorn time comes to mind. It's a quality service based on piracy. But personally I'd rather be legit and pay a bit more in effort or money.

yes, piracy is good.

if you think artists should be paid give them money directly, or go to shows and buy merch.

nearly all intellectual property barriers make no sense in a post-internet world. we effectively live in a world without intellectual property barriers (because piracy is easy and prolific) but for some reason people refuse to acknowledge the free and open flow of art and information as a good thing.

That's because there's no such thing as the free and open flow of art if there's little or no art - or at least high quality art - being made, because creators aren't being rewarded.

It's odd how rarely there's no apparent understanding that the flow needs to go both ways - and if it doesn't go both ways, there is no flow.

I have an unusual perspective on this because 90% of the music I listen to is remixes and 90% of the literature I read is fanfiction.

Which are works of art where a good fraction of the work is done by unpaid amateurs who are at risk of being sued by the "original artists" (or rather their labels/publishers).

The point is, from that perspective, copyright is an existential threat to a very large fraction of the art I consume.

If artists don't get paid directly by sales to consumers absolutely nothing bad will happen. Society will have an abundance of artistic output and artists will find ways to monetise their art anyway. Don't pretend otherwise.

Sure, some middle layers become obsolete, but the point of art wasn't to provide food for its one time symbiotic parasites.

>if you think artists should be paid give them money directly, or go to shows and buy merch.

Would you say that for your work too?

Or it's because conveniently it's not that easily copyable?

Can you please go down load my PyPi package? I need to negotiate a raise.

> In the end somebody got to pay the artists both for the production costs and for making a living on top of them.

"...they are all very poor people who follow as a trade, what other people pursue as a pastime."

http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN4.html#I.10.6

You ask would that make it OK? That would depend on your opinions on Intellectual Property (IP).

I personally think it's fine and expect you think differently.

I'd rather not hash out an entire thing on hacker news about why IP is a well intentioned but bad idea.

Instead I prefer to argue that piracy isn't going anywhere.

Regardless of your opinions on IP, piracy is here to stay. The real questions we need to ask, imo, is how do we progress those IP based industries that have yet to find solutions to piracy.

Music has found value add services, emphasis on live music and merch, as well as a revival in vinyl interest.

Games have found early access, emphasis on online gaming, and crowdfunding.

Video and artistic content creation has found crowd funding, ad revenue, and physical sales of brand products and exclusive value adds (meet a creator).

Software has found expert training, charging for use of apis or backend driven services, charging for additional functionality, often software as complex enough that charging outright for the software and support of it is very common place. Also software highlights that even if one spends countless hours of their lives doing something for free (open source) they can easily take advantage of demand in their technical and creative skills to make a very generous wage in the market.

In conclusion there are a lot of arguments for why we should be IP bound. A lot of these are really good arguments - even the if I voraciously disagree with them. But in the end I don't think IP will win. It's better that we encourage working with solution in a framework with limited or lacking IP.

Sry 4 bad spelling. I'm the lame guy who writes walls of text on hacker news with his phone.

We can imagine but it does not exist. These large companies still have the time and opportunity to provide a better product. If these corporations have so tilted the playing field that supporting organizations that pirate is the only way to encourage them to change, so be it.

> we can imagine a volunteer-run service that's just as good or better than Spotify -- but it's based on piracy. We could also imagine it reaching the pinnacle or convenience, so nothing else could be added except marginal improvements.

I can't.

The whole premise here is that volunteers can't reach every peak, that some endeavors require resources and those endeavors are how companies can be "better than free". Spotify has infrastructure, input streams, curation, and technical advances that I can't see any volunteer organization matching more than in slim part.

> That's good and all, but we can imagine a volunteer-run service that's just as good or better than Spotify -- but it's based on piracy.

That was what.cd. You could get things not found anywhere, the artists / album map was awesome to discover new artists and the forums were the best.

To be fair, spotify was able to thrive because the pirate-solution alternative got shut down (grooveshark).

Grooveshark is exactly the point though. The reason they were better than Spotify was because they had EVERYTHING at a time when other services had much smaller catalogues. Now the movie industry is headed down the same path. No Disney, having your own service isn't going to increase demand, it's going to drive people back to piracy.

I'm at this point already. The price for most video streaming services would be okay if it gave me access to all the content. But I'm never going to pay for Netflix and Amazon and Disney and YouTube Red and the list goes on when I just want to watch one show on each service.

YouTube red isn't even available in my country for some reason. According to advertisements I'd get it with my Google music subscription. Nope. Not available for some reason so enjoy the ads of course no access to their specific content. Back to Spotify and ublock I went.

I don't think most people were using grooveshark BECAUSE it was a pirate-solution. They had paid plans as well that allowed you to do more than the free ones. I don't think most people knew there was any real difference between grooveshark and spotify.

And Napster before that et al.

However, I would still rather use Spotify than go through the bother of downloading dodgy MP3s and synching them to all my devices. I think Spotify's model killed music piracy much more than legal action ever did.

Maybe I just downloaded different stuff, but I think I can count on one hand the number of 'dodgy' MP3 files I ever got from napster/limewire. Even to this day I have friends who say "oh, i never torrent anything today - I got sick of all the viruses I got from limewire whenever I tried to get mp3 files". What on earth were people doing (or searching for) to get viruses from mp3 files?

I do recall reading about some trend major publishers did, with seeding 'bad' versions of songs with the same titles as the 'real' ones, confusing people in to wasting bandwidth and resharing 'bad' files. Was that terribly effective?

> I do recall reading about some trend major publishers did, with seeding 'bad' versions of songs with the same titles as the 'real' ones, confusing people in to wasting bandwidth and resharing 'bad' files. Was that terribly effective?

I remember Madonna's "What the fuck do you think you're doing" mp3's. But it really didn't make me change my habits, or even really annoy me.

Actually, I still haven't changed my habits, as Spotify and Deezer don't have everything I want to listen to, and unlike Grooveshark, they don't allow me to add my own music.

They were being idiots and not paying attention to file types. GoodMusic.mp3.exe

Besides the convienience of streaming, I stick with spotify for their discovery features, and radios that are very targeted and generally produce good results. Their Discovery Weekly, Release Radar, and Daily Mix playlist offer far more value than any other music service has.

Even though I could through a minor effort, take my entire back catalogue of MP3’s (many were pirated and very clearly sorted and organized), pirate a bunch of new content, and upload it all to a streaming service like Google Play Music, I don’t because then I would be missing out on killer curation and discovery features music services offer today.

I've never used Spotify, but even I mostly stopped pirating too... other legal means are just too easy and cheap, and increasingly likely to actually support the artist.

true. happily paying netflix and spotify. if there were a better one to pay for a larger catalogue internationally, I'd be on that. if all you've left is handcuffing customers, your business is already dead.

Except Spotify doesn't pay artists. I'd be glad to pay them if they paid artists.

Of course they don't pay artists. That's not the people Spotify has contracts with. Spotify pays labels, and Spotify pays them a lot. That nothing emerges on the other side is not Spotify's fault.

Right but the label is the equivalent the publisher in this case aka the institution that adds no value.

They pay more than radio per listen.

The are serving songs on demand where radio is not, so what they pay shouldn't be compared with radio.

So instead of the record firm chosen top 50 and the nostalgia 200 it gives the long tail radio play payments too.

It isn't clear what this means. Are you saying that radio isn't as valuable because we can't be sure that anyone is listening? That isn't the way that radio sells its advertising: "We charge less for ads because much of the time nobody is listening!" Beside the study that GP presumably references [0] specifically controlled for audience size.

[0] http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/1155395/business-...

Must-read article about the concept of "better than free":

http://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/

Kevin Kelly proposes "Eight Generatives Better Than Free": immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage, and findability.

This was written back in 2008—very prescient in light of the evolution of content distribution since then, and helpful in articulating what sorts of thing actually manage to add value in this way!

Thank you for this. Absolutely great read. Bookmarked!

> As a group they have slowly been cutting out all the value-adds and buckling down on only one thing: distribution.

What they really offer is filtering; being published in a particular journal is a signal of quality and impact of the work. The production and even distribution pieces are incidental to the value, but filtering is difficult to monetize in a normal market because it has high fixed and zero marginal cost. (The same is largely true of production, and as noted distribution is near zero marginal cost as well.)

Note that this doesn't mean there is no value add: you can have value without marginal cost, such that utility would be lost to customers if you stopped paying the fixed costs. OTOH, if the value produced by the fixed costs has no cost to scale and no practical barrier to people reproducing it once you've produced it, you can't monetize the value produced.

Reputation is built with journals, not publishers.

Publishers _do_ add value to _conferences_ by helping out with funding. Since most smaller interesting conferences aren't at all profitable, it's a "symbiotic" relationship between the conference and the publisher: the publisher effectively runs the conference in return for having exclusive distribution rights over the proceedings. Sucks for the profs and students though.

When a conference gets big enough to raise their own funding _and_ bold enough to shirk their publisher's exclusivity contract, in-house distribution begins to make sense.

Exactly. Academic publishers especially have slashed all the editorial work they traditionally did and now contribute nothing. Unless you want a shitty $150 printing of a book. They are utterly parasitic on other people's money: grants, libraries, university salaries (and the weight of a book publication in promotions)...

When I was in grad school I got a thousand dollars or so to copyedit and typeset a prof's book. He had to pay for it out of his grant. The publisher (Springer) literally did nothing.

This situation was neither inevitable or accidental. I forget a source, but a few decades ago some business types realized academic publishing was a captive market, so bought up a bunch of presses and started exploiting it more and more.

Same thing has happened in music. Record labels used to add a lot of value via scouting out raw talent and new forms of music and then pairing that talent with producers who could polish and refine it. Now they just churn out identical sounding autotuned junk and look for ways to add DRM.

Seems to be a natural tendency for troubled industries to lean into their obsolescence and actually kill their value adds in a futile quest for rent.

I know very little of the music industry, but to me your comment sounds like record labels were this benevolent and creative force and now they are not. That seems suspect to me because as far as I can tell, big name musicians have always complained about the draconian terms and poor treatment they got from their labels.

Take a look at the movie "The Wrecking Crew". It's about studio musicians who took raw material from the record labels' "artists" and turned it into slick, professional work.

If you're familiar at all with 1960's music, you'll recognize their work, it permeates popular music.

The artists themselves were often poor musicians and could not play their own music very well.

After watching the movie, I certainly concluded that the record label added a LOT of value.

Yeah it was amusing to learn how many of the bands whose records they recorded couldn't actually play all the music that got recorded when they toured. Even so, that music seems quite specific to that time and place. It's not as though there weren't any talented musicians in Southern California in the 1960s. It's just that many of the most talented musicians were still playing old-fashioned music, so in the interests of selling more records A&R execs decided to sign less virtuosic musicians and help them out.

So, in that case the record label was "adding value" but the Monkees or the Byrds or whoever didn't really receive that value. They didn't get paid much anyway, so they would have rather made less-polished records that were more authentically their own.

I don't know about the Byrds, but the Monkees weren't even musicians. (Well, one of them was.) They eventually did learn how to play. I bought their "authentic" CD, "Headquarters", and it is, to put it mildly, devoid of any interesting music.

The best thing that ever happened to the Monkees was to have Hollywood write and perform the songs for them, while they lipsynced, clowned around and looked good. The best songwriters in the business wrote their songs. How lucky could they get?

The Monkees were not ripped off in any way. The value they received was becoming famous, and that has enormous value they can use to make money off of anytime they please (and they have done so).

They've never been really great, but my point is that they added more value then than they do now.

One critical value they once provided was to discover and popularize new styles. They don't do that anymore at all. Last time they did in a big way was probably grunge in the early 90s. Since then any new movements have had to go around the major labels. They've retreated to endless retreads of copycat pop.

>>I know very little of the music industry, but to me your comment sounds like record labels were this benevolent and creative force and now they are not.

It's not that they were benevolent, but 25 years ago they held the keys to the castle and disrupting production, distribution, and marketing was nearly impossible. Today with the rise of CDbaby and other agencies handling piecemeal work via the Internet (and bandwidth opening up to serve media), they're dead.

But until recently, their services were quite necessary.

> Seems to be a natural tendency for troubled industries to lean into their obsolescence and actually kill their value adds in a futile quest for rent.

Yes. They seem to be more willing to spend $10X on lobbying to prolong their obsolete business model than $X to pivot to a new one.

I don't know if the number is actually 10, but it certainly appears to be greater than 1.

Zero marginal cost doesn't imply that the product or service in question has no value. Rather, it implies that producing has no value to the firm. But it can still have value to potential consumers.

As an example, take any market with natural monopolies. It costs nearly nothing to a company working with electric power distribution to serve an additional client in comparison to their fixed costs. But the client still wants their electricity.

Publishers don't have a natural monopoly, just a circumstantial monopoly. (Yes I just made that up.)

That produces a completely different implication: Zero marginal cost means that a competitor can come along at any time and charge a zero price. This is the power of advancing information technology: it empowers people with little to no capital & operational budget to have a proportionately huge effect on any information system that has zero marginal cost.

No it doesn't because there are still fixed costs. Even if it costs me the same to send out a software license to the 100th person as it does to the 101st person, I still have to pay to develop the software, pay the rent, the fixed subscription fee of whatever it is I'm using behind the scenes to develop it, host it, etc.

Can you think of a natural monopoly which isn't circumstantial? Is your model falsifiable?

"It costs nearly nothing to a company working with electric power distribution to serve an additional client in comparison to their fixed costs."

I beg to differ. The infrastructure is only part of the cost (the fixed part). The fuel needed to produce the electricity (or the electricity itself) is the variable part. As a consumer I pay much more for the variable part then for the fixed part, therefore what you say can't be correct.

Why do you say that you pay more for the variable part?

It costs money to maintain the distribution network to every additional client. But then they are regulated to (theoretically) cost just enough to ensure such goals. If the network is self-maintaining and already serves every client, then that business would be over, too.

It costs much more money to produce the electricity they use!

I think a root of this problem is traditional framing of business accounting, which focuses on revenues and costs. That has some utility, but when it's the only perspective, you miss things.

Imagine a hamburger shop. In the traditional frame when you want to make more money, you raise revenues (sell more! raise prices!) or cut costs (cheaper ingredients! minimize labor costs!). Using the traditional approach, it's easier to "optimize" by make your product worse and worse.

The Lean Manufacturing folks, on the other hand, look at business as an exercise in value creation for the customer. They split things into value generation vs waste. When they optimize, they look for ways to reduce waste and increase value for the customer.

That focus on value creation is necessary to start businesses; it's hard to build an audience if you're not providing value. It's a shame that it gets lost over time, with profit being the only focus.

> The content distribution problem is capital-s Solved. The reason why publishers are floundering is because their product doesn't add value anymore.

Yep. If you don't add value, don't expect laws to protect you forever.

side note : someone's positive value might just someone else's negative. Example : software patents.

You argue that publishers are being outcompeted because they don't provide value.

First, publishers do provide value.[1] Making copies is a trivial part of publishing; that's a straw man. Publishers add value in their role as gatekeepers and filters. They provide an objective, systematic evaluation of research that others can rely on. That evaluation is expensive. PLOS, a leading open access publisher, charges a $2,000 publication fee. Then consider that in closed journals, half the articles are never read.[2]

Second, publishers are not being outcompeted. Piracy is not an alternative to publishing, so it isn't a competitor. Rather, piracy destroys the market. An author or digital artist also couldn't "outcompete" a pirate. Without publishers, how should researchers keep updated on relevant papers; academic and grant committees triage applicants; the interested public distinguish science from pseudoscience?

Publishers should not bear all the responsibility for a complex ecosystem. We absolutely shouldn't wait to see what happens after the current system collapses. We need to collaboratively imagine and build a better system for communicating and evaluating science.

[1] http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/288447.html

[2] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/half-academic-studi...

> Publishers add value in their role as gatekeepers and filters.

And yet the peer review process relies on unpaid volunteers. Sure, there's some kudos. But the publishers are laughing all the way to the bank.

> They provide an objective, systematic evaluation of research

Publication bias is a thing. A hugely significant thing.

> Piracy is not an alternative to publishing, so it isn't a competitor

This is an odd semantic nitpick without any discernable meaning. I feel very certain that many who benefit from working within academic publication see piracy as a threat to their revenue streams, hence "competition".

> piracy destroys the market

No, the market has simply changed.

> We need to collaboratively imagine and build a better system for communicating and evaluating science

On this I completely agree.

You ignored the best argument: what does PLOS (a non-profit) do with those $2000 they charge the author?

Nobody is disputing that Elsevier et al make a profit that isn't entirely deserved. You don't have to argue that point.

But that glosses over the fact that their revenue is absolutely not pure profit. PLOS shows that there are costs associated with publishing, even if you get a lot of the work for free. Those $2000 are the value that publishers provide. Maybe they're charging $5000 for those $2000 right now, and that's morally suspect. But when that business model is destroyed, someone has to come up with a way to finance those $2000 of value by other means.

Also:

> Publication bias is a thing. A hugely significant thing.

"Publication bias" isn't the arbitrary injection of a publisher's opinions into articles or something like that. It just describes the fact that more surprising, or positive results are more likely to get published.

Doing away with publishers won't have any effect on this mechanism. Any sort of ranking or discovery mechanism will ultimately prefer the more spectacular result, because that's what people are looking for. In the specific case of pharmacology, mandatory pre-registration of trials, and all-encompassing meta-analysis of those is a good strategy, and it's completely orthogonal to the process of publishing the paper.

> piracy as a threat to their revenue streams, hence "competition"

By your logic, I can "compete" with GM by stealing all of their car inventory and blowing up all their factories in Detroit. I don't think that makes sense.

> the market has simply changed

Strongly disagree. What exactly is the new market? Selling journal t-shirts?

> yet the peer review process relies on unpaid volunteers

> Publication bias is a thing

I say that publishers add much more value than pirates. Sure, publishers aren't perfect and others add value too. So what?

Pirates definitely add more value per dollar charged.

An author is defined as someone that authors something and not someone that makes money out of something.

When the market can't compensate authorship per copy this does not mean the author cannot exist, but that authors will be compensated differently.

Do you seriously think that people would stop making music because they can't become millionaires? There's tons of people making a living playing on YouTube, filling the niche, and living off endorsments and side-selling of merch or lessons.

Sure, artists can now sell lessons, but that's not necessarily better than the publisher model.

How do you think your analogy would apply to scientific publishing?

do publishers provide more value than the peer reviewers and the authors? because the subscription & access fees charged by journals disproportionately favor the publishers by a huge margin. a fixed publication fee, peer review and editing should cost some affordable amount to the authors. online distribution should be open and free.

want it printed on dead trees? then sure, pay for a hard copy.

No, and you don't understand the current scientific ecosystem. Researchers are paid for their work through salaries and grants, and therefore benefit from open access. Publishers are not. That's why PLOS must charge authors a fee.

> Researchers are paid for their work through salaries and grants

researchers work 40+ hour weeks for months or years. the majority of the work in publishing is reviewing that research, which is outsourced to peers for free. the actual publication is a tiny part (time-investment wise) of the total value.

By all means, compensate the peer reviewers in addition. But you trivialize what publishers do. The role of the impartial gatekeeper is crucial in our current system. Publishers select the reviewers, analyze the reviews, and accept or reject. Orchestrating all this, by itself, is expensive! That $2000 figure for PLOS would be even higher if they paid reviewers.

Further, peer reviewers review for free because they can afford to--they are being paid by government and industry. Publishers cannot survive without being paid.

> Publishers add value in their role as gatekeepers and filters. They provide an objective, systematic evaluation of research that others can rely on. That evaluation is expensive.

Except it needn't be. Reddit-like voting and commenting site for scientists would work just as well to vet papers and provide valuable feedback to authors with nearly zero overhead.

>Reddit-like voting and commenting site for scientists would work just as well to vet papers

Probably not. There's a well-known essay that explains why karma/votes/likes work very well for easy tidbits like cat photos, gifs, and puns. (The stuff that takes less than 5 seconds to evaluate and requires near-zero effort to judge whether one "likes" it or not.) Unfortunately, I don't have a cite because I forgot who the author was.

Longer topics such as a 20000 word dense research paper with supporting data that requires at least 2 hours of study by a reader/reviewer doesn't work for a karma points system. The effort is too high to contribute significant # of votes. It's the same difficulty for other long form content such as manuscripts for novels/books.

Instead of karma voting, these works require curation that passes the "signal of approval" from one person to the next. With book manuscripts, curation is first done by the literary agents and then the acquisition editors. With scholarly papers, it's a somewhat analogous process (committee 1st pass then forwards to the peer reviewers). Each "approver" has a reputation which signals to the next person that it's ok to invest the hours into studying the work. This social signaling mechanism is also similar for startup entrepreneurs' business plans and VCs. VCs would rather be exposed to your business idea from a referral rather than an unsolicited cold email. All 3 domain examples of book manuscripts, academic research, and business plans share the same theme: people have limited time to wade through a vast sea of poor quality content.

I think people can conclude that flipping through 100 cat photos is different than slogging through 100 dense papers. Another example of this dynamic is the Stackoverflow voting system. There have been several meta discussions lamenting the fact that the "easy" questions attracts a high volume of activity (answers + votes) but the "hard" questions languishes with little attention. That's because the easy questions are more analogous to the low-effort cat photos.

Another commenter in the thread mentioned that github solved workflow for programmers and the same could be done for peer reviewing academic papers. This is misunderstanding the underlying issue.

Evaluating dense papers is not an "information technology workflow problem" that's waiting for collaboration software to solve. The bottleneck is human effort to properly read papers to judge its correctness and significance. In 1687, a human would read Newton's Principia Mathematica at ~200 words-per-minute and after several hours, maybe he'd conclude that "yes, F=ma looks reasonable here". It's 300 years later and we're still the same slow humans reading papers at ~200 wpm. It's worse now because there's a larger glut of bad papers to wade through than before.

Peer review of novels, scientific papers, business plans, is not solvable by a Github/Sharepoint/DropBox. The bottleneck isn't the copying of pdf or LaTeX files from one person to the next. It's the hours of human effort to judge the papers and signal to the next person to also expend hours of human effort.

The issue about publishers isn't the filtering. The real issue is that they they charge too much money for filtering. The high profits is misleading some people to think it's an easy problem solved by github or a reddit-like voting system.

> I think people can conclude that flipping through 100 cat photos is different than slogging through 100 dense papers.

You're attacking a straw man. I said reddit-like, not reddit-clone. There are plenty of obvious problems with reddit's voting system. So what?

What is scientific consensus if not a vote among some random sampling of scientists studying a field. What's left is to formalize this process in an open system so we're not beholden to the publishers and other parties with perverse incentives.

> Evaluating dense papers is not an "information technology workflow problem" that's waiting for collaboration software to solve. The bottleneck is human effort to properly read papers to judge its correctness and significance.

You're wrong. Firstly, it's often impossible to judge the significance of a result even soon after publishing.

Secondly, reviewers already donate their time to review papers, so the human effort is already there. What's needed is a well-recognized system encoding a publishing process, whereby some random selection of scientists obtain access to early drafts with a way to provide commentary and ratings on various metrics, with final publication after some quality consensus is reached among the random selection of reviewers (as a rough idea).

This is exactly an information technology problem.

> I said reddit-like, not reddit-clone.

Yes, and that's what I understood you to mean and a reddit-like voting system for papers is what I was talking about. (I even wrote "reddit-like voting system" as my last sentence in the post you replied to.)

>You're wrong. Firstly, it's often impossible to judge the significance of a result even soon after publishing.

I'm not talking about "significance" in relation to the whole of human history. I mean "significance" in the sense of a threshold for requesting other people to invest their time & effort to study the paper and also the subsequent subscribers to read.

>, reviewers already donate their time to review papers, so the human effort is already there.

Yes, but the key you're missing is that they donate their time because a respectable _somebody_ requested them to do so. The triggers for motivating that donated effort matters.

If I'm a working scientist working 50 hours a week, I'm not logging into a reddit-like voting system and investing hours to read (mostly bad) papers that have 0 votes so I can submit my 1 vote. No, somebody I respect (e.g. a journal editor) needs to ping me and say, "hey, this paper looks interesting, can you review it?" After I peer review it, I may get some quid-pro-quo such as free access to the journal's other papers and/or when it's my turn to submit a paper, the editor will consider forwarding it. So yes, I'm not "paid in cash" but I'm paid "in kind" with some intangibles.

That social dynamic is not replicable in a reddit-like voting system.

Therefore your following scenario of:

>whereby some random selection of scientists obtain access to early drafts

... is not realistic because scientists do not want to be part of random pool to be assigned random papers. That's contrary to basic human nature! Scientists want papers referred to them by another human and not an algorithm. It's not a technology problem, it's a human problem.

All the software suggestions to solve this from programmers including ideas such as a reddit-like system, or a github-like system, or a blockchain type system, etc ... they all misunderstand the culture and psychological motivations of publishing.

>What is scientific consensus if not a vote among some random sampling of scientists studying a field.

Yes, I can see that if you reduce the problem to the simple abstraction of "votes", it seems like building a software platform to formally capture votes is The Solution.

What your simplification leaves out is all the human signaling required before people render their votes. That's the human dynamic that collaboration software doesn't solve.

(In any case, an accepted published paper isn't "consensus" per se; it's just another piece of evidence for people to weigh. The paper just passed through enough human curation filters that may be worthwhile to read.)

True, and putting it that way makes it seem painfully obvious. Yet countless companies led by seemingly rational adults somehow came to the opposite conclusion. Pretty fascinating, and I think it's a mistake to use our 20/20 hindsight to dismiss them as mere dinosaurs/idiots. I'm guessing here, but it seems like it must happen incrementally -- frog-in-the-pot-of-water style. Like they react correctly to each small change considered in isolation, but then either don't see or don't accept, and therefore can't react to, the bigger underlying paradigm shift in progress, that unites and explains all the small incremental changes. At the end of a certain interval of time, it's obvious they've failed, yet with each small decision they probably thought they were reacting appropriately. And everybody around them affirmed that. Couple books' worth of interesting material there.

So if you want to have any hope of seeing things coming, you almost have to think in un-utterable heresies... and bam, I just realized I'm repeating a Paul Graham essay. Ah well. This paragraph's over!

What do you mean by "floundering"? Not providing a lot of value? If so, I could agree, but otherwise, they're doing really well, and have about managed to co-opt the open access movement to ensure they maintain their ridiculous profit margins.

By 'better than free', are you referring to this[1] by Kevin Kelly. To quote from it:When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied. And goes ahead to list 8 qualities of what can be sellable once distribution is no longer the value-getter. [1] http://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/

There still needs to be some kind of repositories though and someone will need cash to operate those. We could also use a discovery method to find the repositories and a common payment protocol. Then there's reviews and trust to consider.

I agree that internet for distribution is the way to go but I wouldn't put a capital-s on solved just yet.

The best example is Steam.

Pirate a game? Hard to find, lot of chances to get viruses and you have to update your fixed .exe every patch.

Buy it? 2 clicks, one download, done. If you can wait a little you get those at half price during sales. You have user reviews and forums to check before you buy instead of paid-for "professional" reviews.

This applies to all media. I work for s major media company and they have been cutting editorial hugely. And yet they worry about readership - why would readers increase if the quality decreases?

The repeated use of the word "pirate" here is absurd. From a moral standpoint, the argument against piracy is that it deprives creators of their livelihood. In scientific publishing, creators (and even reviewers!) are not compensated by publishers, and "piracy" actually helps their careers (this is why scientists are, in general, so strongly in favor of Sci-hub). But by abusing emotionally laden language and false comparisons with the music industry, the author hopes to win sympathy for an industry that, honestly, needs to radically change or die.

A few years ago, I wanted to switch my CS specialty from computer vision to bioinformatics and biology simulation. I have always been intrested in optimization, often wrote GPU code, found biology much more rewarding than augmented reality.

A good researcher in the field was generous enough to guide me through the process and gave me a list of basic and also cutting edge articles that I should understand to be useful in the field. Coming from CS, I expected the literature to be basically free to download from researchers webpages. Boy was I wrong.

The guy sent me a few copies, I was at the time also working close to a uni so I leeched a few from their library access, but this was a new field for me: every article rests on well-known conclusions explained in another article so I needed a ton of references, each bringing other references. Exactly like when you start reading an article in wikipedia on a subject you don't know.

At one point I just felt ashamed of asking articles after articles and my library (that was not specialized in biology) only had half the articles I needed. I considered paying for them, but I needed probably at least 200 references and each was in 30 dollars range.

I quit. I am still doing computer vision. I was ready to earn less to do research in a critical field for society, but I abandoned mostly because of this stupid barrier, that said that not only should I be ready to earn less, but also pay a huge rent to people I know to be parasites in order to be allowed to help research.

Fuck that.

This also highlights another effect: imagine you would have stuck around, and not have bundled access to all required papers because, as you said, it's outside of your main department (which also, obviously, encourages that expertise stays in its own little silos) . You'd have to be selective with which articles you give a try. And which ones will that be? In this age if Google Scholar, more often than not the ones with a lot of citations already, I bet.

So the already existing effect of people sticking to the commonly accepted truth is amplified. But science works at the edge of our knowledge, where what is already known breaks down and different and/or less commonly known ideas and solutions are needed.

Was this before Sci-Hub existed?

Yes. There was a newsgroup (or already a subreddit?) where people asked for articles and got answered with copies but these were usually students or researchers stuck by a specific article they could not get. Not someone like me who would have to ask 20 references at a time.

Well, that suggests that now is a good time to at least explore things again. Bioarxiv also exists now

Off topic, would you be able to share the list of the articles given to you by your colleague?

I concur fuck it. Im in a similar place right now. You'll figure it out.

Also: piracy in music is more bounded because distributors have adapted to add value for users, at a reasonable price, sharing some revenue with the creators. (I'm thinking Spotify, YouTube, etc)

Sci-hub has been a total game changer. Plug in a DOI, get a paper. No accounts/tracking, no payment, no looking up the journal and their access model. Just research. The simplicity of use and ease of access is unparalleled.

I'm not a working scientist - I have no paid-for University access to a variety of journals or other such connections, nor do I know the intricate details of how research is published. What I do know is that I'm a citizen helping to fund much of this work, and access to primary literature is critically important to make informed decisions about our future. The academics are paid a salary to produce findings, not to sell individual copies (unlike the music industry comparisons). While I'm willing to pay something, I can't be expected to pay the huge costs to access individual papers that are demanded today. Open access journals like PLOS are fantastic, but it's an unfortunate reality that much of the quality research is published on platforms that charge $30 for a paper. Until this changes, sci-hub is my answer.

> I'm a citizen helping to fund much of this work

This is where my issue is. I have personally seen government-funded studies whose authors did not publish the full datasets of their findings (they were 'inconvenient' to the conclusion they were attempting to come to), and it was only discovered in emails unearthed in discovery when a company spent over a million dollars suing the government over the decisions made based upon the study.

Long story short, if my taxes pay for a study, I want full access to everything, supplementary data included. But sadly, that may not heaven even been enough for this particular cover-up.

Wow, now you got me curious about that case... Dare elaborate?

https://blog.priceplow.com/dmaa-supplements/geranium/ikhlas-...

As a disclaimer, this is my site

This a climate change conspiracy conspiracy.

You and me both. I could have written that. Kind of did my own:

What the academic publishing industry calls "theft" the world calls "research": Why Sci-Hub is so popular

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_th...

> Sci-hub has been a total game changer. Plug in a DOI, get a paper. No accounts/tracking, no payment, no looking up the journal and their access model. Just research. The simplicity of use and ease of access is unparalleled.

Here's the funny thing: this is exactly what the Web was invented for. This is how this was supposed to work! You get an URI (DOI is a form of URI), and you use that URI to get to the content. Just linking, no bullshit.

It's no surprise SciHub is popular. It makes things work the way they always should have.

It costs some money to get a DOI. Publishers can still be content aggregators and indexers, or curators. Sci-hub is merely an archive.

Paying $30 to merely look at a paper that may or may not be valuable is ridiculous no matter how you slice it.

You aren't meant to pay the $30, you're meant to be inside the firewall at an institution.

And that excludes 99% of taxpayers.

> It costs some money to get a DOI

Can't be too much, seeing as I can put a semi-unlimited number of PDFs up on Figshare and get DOIs for them for free.

IIRC it's about a dollar a piece.

A number that points to a URL costs a dollar.

At 4k per DOI, you can store 1/4 million of them per GB. They are basically MAC addresses for documents.

I agree there is value added by curation. But today, academic publishing is an industry worth over $10b, and they don't actually pay for the original access or license of the content or the editing and peer-review. Publishers do add value but not to the extent of the cost that's passed on to the public today.

> content aggregators and indexers, or curators

This is an active Machine Learning task in a lab at my university. Given the kind of progress they are making, I don't see publishers finding much monetary value in this task in the future.

I'm not entirely sure about that. But luckily there is an easy way to find out.

All we need to do is give Sci-hub free reign to publish scientific articles, and see what happens.

If anyone is confused like I was:

"Gold open access": publish paper in a publicly accessible academic journal.

"Green open access": self-publish. For instance, throw it on a website, and allow it to be indexed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access

""" In gold open access, you write a paper and pay a big company lots of money to give it away for free. For some reason this isn't catching on.

In green open access, you publish your paper with a big company. They charge people to read it – but you make another version available for free. This has not caught on except in math and physics.

In diamond open access, you publish your paper with a journal that's free for you and free for the people who read it. This has also not caught on, because most "prestigious" journals – the ones you need to publish in to get a job – are run by companies who don't do stuff for free.

In black open access, people illegally download millions of papers and books from big companies and make them available to everyone for free. This is working great. """ - John Baez post on google-plus.

It's a great post.

https://plus.google.com/+johncbaez999/posts/Wto5MmfCP9o

Thank you. It was an embarrassingly badly written article, not to even define the basic terms.

The author is allowed to expect a certain domain knowledge. For example, an article about an advanced physics topic is not expected to explain Newton's laws.

Agreed. I should have been more clear on my criticism. If the author had the goal of convincing people beyond their existing audience then explaining their terms would have helped significantly.

There's even more distinctions: is there an embargo or not, is it gratis or libre, pay-to-publish or not, and is the full journal open? Here's an overview: https://medium.com/flockademic/how-open-can-open-access-be-c...

That was confusing, thanks. I thought "Gold" meant "Put up a paywall and charge lots of money," "Green" meant "Put up a paywall and charge moderate amounts of money," and "Black" meant "Hoist the Jolly Roger and don't charge anything at all."

Gold means the author pays the cost of publishing, potentially several thousand dollars.

Green means "arxiv": the author uploads a "preprint" version to a website. The "official" version is in a conventional reader-pays journal.

"Black" does indeed mean sci-hub piracy.

It's not that complicated. The author seems to think that academic journals were somehow high-quality products that were co-opted by privacy. The music industry also, once upon a time, thought that offering disks in record stores was a high-quality offering.

Music pirates forced the music industry to realize that they were charging too much for user-hostile formats. Publishing pirates ought to force the publishing industry to realize that they are charging too much for user-hostile formats, too.

The music industry started to win back market-share from pirates when they understood that they had to compete with pirate offerings and offer a better, higher-quality product. The results were iTunes, then Spotify and similar competitors (Google Music etc.). The publishing industry ought to be no exception.

I'm not sure the academic publishing industry is going to get what little goodwill the music industry has. With iTunes and so on, there's at least the idea that some small fraction of the money spent is going back to the artists.

That doesn't seem to be the case with academic publishing, where you have these purely rent-seeking corporations. Why would I want to give Elsevier my money, when the authors of the paper don't get any of it?

That's the problem academic publishing has, making it hard to recognize sci-hub as illegitimate.

(One of my happiest academic publishing experiences was when I wrote a paper while working for the US government, which meant there was no copyright for the publisher to insist on stealing from me.)

I would prefer to see the reviewers of a paper getting paid than the authors.

I was a founder of a startup in the 80s that was part funded by Elsevier. I spent a fair bit of time discussing the possible impact of computer networks and graphical displays on their business model with their then CTO.

Please go on. Your anecdote stopped before any of the interesting parts. Did the then-CTO not see any of this coming, or did he/she just think that they couldn't change anything one way or the other?

Some people might disagree but I also believe that piracy has played a huge role in leading to those better and higher-quality results such as iTunes, (and especially) Spotify.

I can clearly remember that the cost of a single album on CD was (and still is) equal to the amount of money I pay to Spotify each month for completely unlimited use. Since Spotify (and other similar services) are still alive, I think you can still make some decent amount of money without being too much greedy.

Regarding your last sentence: Spotify may still be alive, but it's losing massive amounts of money. One example article about this: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-15/spotify-l...

"they understood that they had to compete with pirate offerings and offer a better, higher-quality product."

They (music industry) 'understood' once Jobs had used all of his negotiating skills to convince labels to join iTunes and they saw the money the service raked in. There was zero innovation coming from the publishers. The first response to napster was not to develop a better distribution method but to go to courts and add DRM to their music CD:s by injecting a rootkit to the users computer! Oh the shitstorm the Sony's audio CD DRM raised...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_roo...

> The author seems to think that academic journals were somehow high-quality products that were co-opted by privacy.

Indeed. And indeed, academic journals used to be high-quality products, that were run on a not-for-profit (or nearly so) basis. Then they were co-opted by rent-seeking corporations. Who have been gutting substance -- careful peer review, editing, proofreading, typesetting, and quality printing -- and focused on over-the-top squeezing of the academic sector. It's arguable that they are the pirates. Or maybe slavers.

I think you are almost right. Today they aren't a high quality product, however 30 years ago they were. The journals just did rent-seeking behavior, cutting staff that made the journals high quality. Piracy didn't ruin them though I agree there.

The author is asking how we'd be able to make Open Access happen through legal means - and yes, that's complicated [1], otherwise it'd been solved already.

[1] https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarl...

"Music pirates forced the music industry to realize that they were charging too much for user-hostile formats. "

No, it's simply a matter of people being able to take something for free and not pay for it.

'Any cost' is too much if someone can grab it for free.

The format was never the issue in terms of price, given IP protections. But the 'new' format implied weak IP protections, ergo a new price point of zero.

The music industry is not winning back market share, they're just adapting to other forms of revenue - and it has nothing to do with a 'higher quality product' - at least not in terms of the file/audio formats themselves.

In my opinion, at the root of a lot of these problems is the fact that copyright has moved from being something designed to have a very limited duration and then expire, to something that lasts far more than a lifetime.

If copyright still expired in 14 or 28 years, we'd have a rich public domain from which to draw from. Think about all of the "fan fiction" that could be commercialized, or the textbooks which could be freely modified and redistributed by students and the academic community.

Because the public domain has been cheated out of such wealth (in no small part due to lobbying by Disney and other IP-based corporations) it really doesn't surprise me that piracy is so popular.

What wealth? We already have plenty of public domain works, and they get bundled 50 to 100 movies in a set for ten dollars. We already have plenty of things you can make fan fiction of an monetize, but very little public domain stuff gets that. There was a spate of this in comics, with people attempting to do that with The Shadow or Green Hornet, or other lapsed properties.

What people really want to do is make money by piggybacking off established brands that spend a lot of money to remain relevant. They don't want public domain in general, they want disney to be stripped of copyright protections so they can milk them dry through parasitical works.

But they don't get that once that happens, the works because worthless precisely because no one is willing to spend more than the bare minimum on something they can't protect. It just winds up on youtube for free; who cares about spending money restoring or advertising for it?

You're telling me star wars would have never been made if Lucas only had 28 years of exclusive rights to the franchise? Please.

Here's some public domain characters that have ended up in works that have given a lot of people entertainment: Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Dolittle... that Mickey Mouse and C3PO haven't joined this list is only because of relatively recent extension of copyright terms, which have amounted to a transfer of wealth towards those who didn't need more of it to be artistically creative...

Information economics seem to be playing out exactly as expected. The price of a good is reverting to its cost of production--near $0 for copying bytes. You can't stop the rock.

In Information Rules, Shapiro & Varian argue that if you're selling an information product, all that you can charge for is the value that you add on top of the information, such as convenience, freshness, etc. It's best to assume the information itself is free.

> The price of a good is reverting to its cost of production--near $0 for copying bytes.

That needs the word "marginal" inserted just before the word "cost".

Thanks, and good catch. I agree that high fixed costs underlie the very first production unit, followed by cheap distribution and low marginal costs.

Can you explain why?

When you're making a new movie, the production of the master copy can cost millions of dollars. Same thing with software products, songs, and digital photos. However, making a digital copy after that is very cheap.

Therefore, it's better to say that the marginal production cost moves towards zero instead of the total production cost, which would include the master copy cost.

Marginal economics seems to be rather popular, but I'm still a stickler for classical ideas of value personally.

Well then, the price of a good is nowhere near reverting to its cost of production, which is obviously far higher than the cost of the Nth copy of that good.

Huh? If you're selling an information product, then you can charge for the information. I.e. if the information you produced/collected is better, better organized or more convenient than what you and I can find searching hours on the internet. That has value, a lot of value, and you can, and should charge for it.

The problem with academic publishers is that they don't do any of the above. The information isn't even really theirs! That's why their product is essentially worthless...

This argument proves too much. Music and app stores seem to be doing fine selling files for more than the cost of copying the bytes. Also, consider Bitcoin.

Most music can be found for free on pirate sites and YouTube (but I repeat myself). The Music and app stores are providing convenience, not the actual bits.

Bingo. You know what I never pirate? Music and games, because of Google Music and Steam.

And promising to pay the artist. A lot of people actually want to financially support the creators of things they enjoy.

I imagine many would also like to show support towards the author of the paper. But the money paid for the paper pretty much only goes to the publisher.

Weirdly, sometimes the author has to pay the publisher to get published. And then the publisher again gets money from people buying the paper! All in the name of getting published in a 'respectable' journal.

Yep. It's trivial to download the preview files on Bandcamp - view source, look for the URLs starting popplers5.bandcamp.com - but nobody does, because you'd have to be a bit of a dick. And Bandcamp takes only 15% at most, the rest is passed straight to the artist/label.

Paying the middleman in the hope that they in turn will pay the artist is a little naive though.

That is actually solved separately with things like Patreon, etc.

Pretty much all markets sell convenience. Buying something at one place and time and selling it in another that's more convenient to the buyer is what traders do.

And yes, alternatives exist. But companies are selling the bits for more than the cost of production and millions of people are buying it, despite cheaper competition. This seems to be sustainable. So the original argument about economics and what markets will bear is false.

And the point is that using a free search engine is cheaper AND more convenient than reading through a journal. Like, would you subscribe to a poorly curated version of HN and Reddit instead of just going to the source?

Don't people tend to prefer services where the marginal cost of digital goods is ~0, or perhaps somewhere around the value of an ad impression? I.e. Patreon, spotify premium or netflix, but also free services like youtube and soundcloud or free apps with ads.

The value of bitcoin is actually that high above its production/maintenance cost because of the growing value of cryptographically-guaranteed currency - that said, I gather the act of copying bytes across the congested bitcoin network is particularly costly.

Were publisher really adding zero value ? honest question.

Did they help people finding books, or organized events, helped authors in any albeit indirect way ?

Well, the idea was that they sorted the wheat from the chaff, published only the good stuff, and therefore saved you time. I'm not sure how effective they currently are at providing this service, though.

They are not providing that service. The reviewers are other scientists working for free. All the publisher is doing is coordinating the work.

They get the content for free, they get the editing for free, now that they are digital rather than print, distribution costs almost nothing ... and then they sell back the research to the institutions who created it in the first place.

They're a parasite, and have been for years.

The other awful part is their "bundling" - only want access to journals X, Y and Z? Tough. You have to buy them in a package that includes bottom of the barrel journals A-W as well, for a huge fee.

Two thoughts:

- Most of the journals I publish in do a considerable amount of layout, and I find this to be a significant value in reading papers.

- At least one of the academic societies I'm in is essentially financially dependent on the income they make from allowing $Publisher to publish their society journal. My corner of science would be considerably worse off if that was dropped.

They are certainly valid points, and the second one especially so, but the current situation can't go on.

In cryptography, we've had eprint.iacr.org for a while now and if you want your paper to get noticed, an eprint version will do more for you than a talk at a second-tier conference. Even at first-tier conferences like Crypto, people will sometimes have "eprint 20xx/yyy" on their last slide to encourage people to go and read the paper.

Peer review still has direct value, and peer reviewed publications on your CV have indirect value so the IACR conferences (and possibly Springer/LNCS) aren't going away any time soon. But everyone I know of in the field looks on eprint first when they actually want to read papers.

The article and it's original title are about black open access (piracy) winning over green (author-distributed in parallel to journal publication) and gold (journals being paid, per article, to directly provide open access) open access models, not about open access winning over non-open access. Taking “black” out of the title radically changes the meaning.

Open access journals have failed in part because they lack the prestige of top tier journals like cell or nature

Exactly this. Want people to publish in open access journals? Make high impact journals open access. People are going to publish in whichever journal most helps their career, not whichever journal has the best licensing scheme.

The reason traditional publishing has failed is because even at the highest tier universities there is not universal access to content or even access to the majority of content. Sure my University will buy me whatever paper I want, but I don't want to wait a day to get a paper and then discover that it is not actually pertinent to my work when I can get it on scihub in five minutes without having to fill out a request form. Until there are bundled services a la Spotify which provide access to almost everything, scihub will continue to flourish.

The issue has very little to do with price and much more to do with convenience to the researcher.

The business model of journals seem to be particularly perverse and artificial. The universities not only have more brand value and credibility but also the resources to publish journals themselves.

It's interesting how the journals managed to get a monopoly on this over 50 years. There seems to little reason for a private entity to be able to inject themselves here and take control of public output.

It's like the public paying for oil exploration with private companies like Exxon Mobil stepping in when it is found to take control and sell the oil. This doesn't seem to have anything to do with capitalism or any ism, it looks like pure theft.

>It's interesting how the journals managed to get a monopoly on this over 50 years. There seems to little reason for a private entity to be able to inject themselves here and take control of public output.

I think it's symbiotic relationship between universities. Universities get together and decide who to pay to distribute their "best" research, in effect creating a prestige/walled garden affect surrounding academic publishing, raising the barrier for non well monied researchers having access to the audience.

If universities decided that they would no longer publish in nature et al., and just put publications on arvix or something, then the monopoly would effectively die, but It's not in their interest to do so since universities will have to compete on mind-share on what papers attract the most interest in a field and chip away at the advantages they have today.

Long term though, universities will loose their advantage as it becomes easier to engage and propagate knowledge outside of such.

Pretty much.

The value is in the brand. The brand value includes editing and keeping up the quality.

With open access model, high prestige journal could ask much more per publication than $1,500 - 3,000 normal open access journal does.

If they the cost of publishing in Nature would be $15,000 and they would continue publishing 800 articles per year, it would make $12 million per year. If they would double the number of articles published they could make almost the same money with smaller fee.

So, network effects? How familiar.

Not really a network effect. More a reputation effect.

Journal's got reputation, so everybody reads it, and everybody tries to publish in it, so journal gets many good submissions that help maintain its reputation.

New open publication journal gets no reputation, so nobody reads it, and nobody submits to it, so it gets nothing, and can't ramp up its reputation.

Network effect.

I disagree. The two are related, but not synonymous.

The classic network effect example is the telephone - the system is is of zero utility if no-one you know uses the system.

Reputation effects are more decoupled and fuzzy. A tiny niche journal with small readership can nonetheless have a high reputation if it only publishes highly regarded articles.

Reputation = network.

"After all, the pirates have long since been chased out of the music business (Gapper, 2017)."

The pirates were doing the chasing. Without the pirates, we wouldn't have multiple competing services that grant unlimited access to practically every note of commercial recorded music for a very modest amount of money.

If scientific publishing had a Spotify or Apple Music, then there would be no need for a sci-hub. Your move, Wiley.

Title, together with the domain, is very misleading. The impression is that Wiley is admitting defeat against open access. Instead, the author (not affiliated with Wiley) regrets that piracy is winning over open access.

Are the pursuits of knowledge and profit in conflict?

Open access to knowledge is in conflict with the pursuit of profit because knowledge-asymmetry is easy to monetize.

Yes.

They have been for decades.

Thankfully the internet created another door, but we'll see how long that lasts...

> Thankfully the internet created another door, but we'll see how long that lasts...

Can't put the toothpaste back into the tube. The interesting thing about the Internet is that its creators were either unaware, didn't care, or more likely, didn't see as negative (regarding the economic impacts) they were creating something that would eliminate scarcity of information. Everyone else observing either shared that lack of awareness in slowing the train, or was not able to foresee the practical impacts.

Any attempt to put the brakes on now is going to be a net economic loss. Profit-seeking entities have an interest in preserving the internet as-is, even if they make occasional short term decisions counter to that (like abandoning net neutrality).

The handful of industries that profit entirely off of information scarcity will either adjust or go away. They really should spend their money finding new value streams rather than fighting piracy. That's not winnable.

> Can't put the toothpaste back into the tube.

Some seem to think it’s possible: The Digital Imprimatur (https://fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/) was written in 2003, and it’s mostly gotten worse since then; see The coming war on general-purpose computing (https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html).

And once the publishing, movie and music industries have 'gone away, together with the authors, artist and producers who rely on them for a living, what kind of world will that be?

Nah, the high-margin vs "what the market can bear in terms of margin", are in conflict.

Textbooks reaching $200 is the problem.

I spent over $1,000 one quarter on books because I couldn't buy ANY of my books used as they all had half of the content in one-time online codes. Even worse, the online codes expire every quarter.

Complain to your university's administration that the faculty is outsourcing assessment to the textbook company. The access codes are a racket, but they are a convenient racket, because the university doesn't have to hire extra faculty or assistants for grading tests and running tutorials, teaching faculty is seriously overburdened.

It's really bad and has gotten worse in the last 20 years. This is a standard text for advanced undergraduate organic chemistry: https://www.amazon.com/-/dp/0387683461

USD 35 on Amazon plus another USD 35 for its sister volume, good for all Orgo courses that an undergraduate might choose to take. A new edition would come out every 8 - 10 years. Solid. Good addition to the personal library when working in the field. Over 2500 pages altogether. Whoever says that isn't a fair deal is lying.

This is the slim-down-rip-off introductory textbook edition: https://www.amazon.com/-/dp/0073402745/

USD 268, but you get an access code. And a new edition seemingly every other year, as if the content in introductory courses changed that fast. It's a useless piece of dead tree, never to be looked at again once the course is over.

It's the students' turn to revolt. The situation has been intolerable for a long time.

Journals and publishers should start focusing on creating value out of their community: the authors and readers they've attracted.

http://hypothes.is/ is a nonprofit that makes annotation tech that some are using to publish peer-reviews, not just the article. I think that's pretty cool. Give the content away for free (you have to/should), but focus on having the best community around it.

The topic of academic journals comes up repeatedly on HN (which is great) and is inevitably filled with an echo chamber of people saying that publishers add zero value, produce a literally worthless product, and they should all be put out of business. I’ve grown tired of the hyperbole, but sometimes (like now) I try to add a bit of perspective from within the industry. FWIW I serve on the board of SAGE, which is an independent but relatively large academic publisher.

Publishing articles has real costs. This is not about hosting PDFs, it’s about everything that goes into editorial curation, managing peer review, marketing a journal to build a brand, copy editing/formatting, and then yes, finally at the end of the day hosting a PDF. Those tasks do indeed have costs. They range from anywhere from something on the order of $500 - $5,000 per published article. Nobody is publishing at scale for cheaper than that. The argument that it should only cost something like $30 to publish an article is a complete fantasy. So if you want to argue about the value add and that all publishers do is sit around collecting rent for doing nothing, you have to check your hyperbole and come to the debate with reasoned arguments about the realistic costs of performing the very real tasks that are performed.

There has never been a better time to try to be an academic publisher for cheaper than the incumbents. The tech infrastructure is there, clearly the PR and anti-publisher sentiment is on your side. So why aren’t there millions of publishers springing up to publish articles for $30 a pop (or even better - free!)? It’s because it’s not possible to do the job that’s required for free or for that low a price. But there are literally no technical barriers to someone trying. Come up with a complete alternative to the journal system for publishing research, or figure out how to magically do it for free. There’s nothing technical in your way, but there are still major hurdles. You’ll find that doing the job a publisher does in fact involve work. You can deride that work all you want, but you cannot deny that publisher do indeed spend the money to do that work. So if you think that work is truly worthless you should launch a competitor that doesn’t do any work at all.

But the biggest barrier to radical changes in business model is all cultural. Academics are slow to change, and you cannot underestimate the importance of reputation. So any competing product has to address the cultural role that journals play (working as proxy for quality measurement and assessing academic job applicants). So yes, you can put PDFs online for basically free. That’s not the job of journals. To replace journals you have to solve the content curation and bestowing of prestige issues in some other way. There are loads of people trying (or startups that have died trying), and so far nothing has done much to dislodge the journal (and particularly Impact Factor) as the sole arbiter of academic quality. It’s a heroic task to try to tackle, because largely I think the world would be a better place if there was some real disruption in how academics judge other academics.

Now onto Gold OA. From my perspective Gold OA, which means the author funds the publication of the article, typically through baking it into the research funding grant, is making HUGE progress. Gold OA publishing is one of the fastest growing segments (both by revenue and number of articles published) for all major publishers — at least in STM fields. In fields where there isn’t readily accessible grant money (the humanities and social sciences) there isn’t nearly as much progress on Gold OA (and the path forward isn’t clear either). But Gold OA is so mainstream now that I can imagine it gobbling up the entirety of STM publishing in 10-20 years (god I hope before that, but this industry moves slow).

I’m happy to talk more about academic publishing from the counter perspective to most people here, although a lot of these discussions can be more productive outside of the HN forum. Feel free to email me (details in profile).

Would you care to give a some sort of breakdown on how publishing one article costs even $500, let alone $5000? I have tried to ask this from publishers I've published with, but never get any real answers. Also, the obscene profit margins reek of rent-seeking.

Authors, reviewers and mostly editors don't get paid. The "services" that the publishers provide are mostly some outsourced minimum-paid clerk complaining how some technical detail doesn't match some arbitrary rules arising from an arcane system.

Before such breakdown is given, I keep on thinking you are leeching the work of scientists and taxpayers and making the world a worse place.

Oh, and I forgot to mention an important feature, which I often take for granted as obvious but is worth spelling out. much of the work that goes into processing a manuscript goes into processing all the manuscripts that come in, not only the ones that get published. So when you have a journal that is intending to serve as a filter for importance and is as selective as possible (ie Nature, Cell, etc), you end up rejecting 90+% of articles. All those rejected articles take work to process and come to a rejection decision. So the name of the game then is trying to cover the cost of all the things you reject by monetizing all the things you accept. That's why megajournals that intentionally do not filter by importance (and thus can accept a higher proportion of submissions) are able to charge less (it's obviously not pure cost economics, top tier journals charge for their brand name as well of course).

So, how about giving the breakdown of the price that the parent comment asked? On a $1000 article, how much gets to the people doing this filtering? How much in the people organizing the peer review? How much ends up in the pockets of the rentiers?

I associate to jempekka's feeling:

> Before such breakdown is given, I keep on thinking you are leeching the work of scientists and taxpayers and making the world a worse place.

I would add that by not answering, you lose any right to complain about an "echo chamber" wrongly assuming that paywalls are unnecessary evils.

It's mostly people costs. There's also royalties to societies (the basic deal is academic societies own a lot of journals and license them to publishers for a royalty on sales). And there's tech/infrastructure costs for the systems to manage the manuscript workflow (and yes, for hosting the journal websites and serving PDFs). And even in this modern age some journals (most still maybe?) have some print component with costs. You can argue that's ridiculous (as I do) but parts of the academic library market is still in love with print for some reason.

But if you're trying to understand the real cost drivers it all comes back to the people involved. You're totally right in that peer reviewers are almost never paid (there are a few exceptions to this, like eLife). And often editorial boards of journals are not paid. Although there are also a significant amount of paid editors as well, either stipends provided to academics or in house editors. The internal staff manages the peer review process, which includes everything from finding reviewers to hounding reviewers to complete reviews, etc. That peer review management gets done by a combo of unpaid editors and paid editors.

So then there's society journals. More and more society journals have been scooped up by the major publishers, and the academic societies rely on the journal royalty to function. Now, you could argue (as I would) that academic societies should figure out ways to survive without journal subscription revenue royalties being an integral part of their finances (ie run conferences, purely via membership fees, etc) but the current reality is that a huge number of academic societies rely on the journal royalty to stay afloat.

Then there's marketing. A journal lives or dies by its reputation, and building a journal up requires a significant marketing effort to establish a journal to drive submissions. For new OA journals that marketing spend works very differently, and in fact requires a lot more spend on a consistent basis. OA journals live and die by steady submission flow (since the only revenue ever comes from accepted papers), and so you have to market the journal constantly to ensure you drive submissions.

There are also people employed that aren't direct costs to production but are responsible for new product ideas (R&D), and all the kinds of folks that are required to run a large organization, like HR, people in acquisitions trying to grow the business, people in sales, legal, etc etc.

I understand the visceral reaction against publishers. I have the same reaction to the subscription business model to be honest. My preference would be that the service publishers provide gets treated more like what it is - a service to academics who choose to use it - and gets charged accordingly. That's actually exactly what's happening with the move to Gold OA, where authors pay for the service of publishing. IMO that's actually working pretty well in STM, even though there's a long way to go. But unfortunately the non STM fields in the humanities and social sciences are having a lot of trouble in a transition like that. There are two main problems: in HSS there aren't tons of grants that academics can use to fund publication fees, and there's a huge, longstanding cultural assumption that publication should be free to academics, so it's hard to convince people that the publishing service should be bought (for any price). There are other people trying to solve this in different ways, like the Open Library of Humanities, but nothing has had significant success yet.

You can argue with profit levels (although I do think it's funny how much people are against profit in certain businesses and have no problem with profit in others, ie large tech cos). But what I object to is saying that publishers don't provide a valuable service. The use of terms like leech and rent-seeking imply a monopoly position and no value add whatsoever. First, nobody (even Elsevier) has a monopoly. There are 4-5 big publishers (Elsevier, Springer-Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, SAGE) and then a huge number of smaller players (some of whom are substantial and highly influential, like Oxford University Press and Cambridge). So at best you can make the argument it's an oligopoly (although one that has about 2,000 total players).

Sorry, but I don't accept this as a breakdown. Surely as a board member you must know an approximate dollar amount/labor time going to different direct production phases per article published (or submitted). Eg, how much time it takes for the staff to manage the editors, check the manuscripts and lay them out.

The other stuff sounds like overhead, so feel free to lump it as a single figure.

PS. I'm not a fan of (obscene) profits in any industry. Even if one believes in capitalism, the usual basic tenet is that no company's, let alone industry's, profits should be able to consistently surpass the interest rate if the market is working.

I find it sort of ridiculous when publishers throw figures like $1000 a piece as a reasonable APC. That's over two weeks of research stipend in Finland at least. If it takes anywhere near two workweeks to process an article and handle the overhead, you guys really suck at what you do.

It seems to me like the status quo is working pretty well. Publishers do all the things you said, and university libraries pay the subscription fees. Anyone not affiliated with a university just goes to SciHub or the author's webpage and downloads the paper for free. Nobody cares about your copyright and they never have; before SciHub there was your college buddy with a roll of quarters and a photocopier.

You're lucky enough to have the revenue stream you do, so what makes you think there's another one in open access? Authors don't want to pay you, the university already takes half their grant money for such purposes. Unaffiliated readers definitely don't want to pay you. As you admit, you thrive on the prestige of your name, so why not stick to your business model of charging other prestige-focused institutions, and leave the rest of us out of it?

> So why aren’t there millions of publishers springing up

Not millions, but there are a lot of tools [1]. Among them, quite some publishers that are relatively cheap, e.g. [2] [3] [4] to name a few.

So yes, publishing costs money and that's often overlooked, but the current rates by many of the big publishers _are_ excessively high. And yes, the reason they manage to keep them that way is due to the Impact Factor [5], or in other words: not quality. (IF is considered a proxy of quality, but it's not quality itself.)

Yes, gold OA has been making a lot of progress, but at what cost? It has resulted in the transfer of the extortionate practices that allows subscription costs to balloon, to publication costs. So rather than researchers at less-wealthy institutes (or not at institutes at all) being unable to access research, they're unable to publish their own. Is that better? Maybe, but in any case, not by a lot.

That said, thank you for your perspective - it's great to be able to get out of the echo chamber sometimes.

[1] https://101innovations.wordpress.com/2015/12/25/timeline-of-... [2] https://www.ubiquitypress.com/ [3] https://www.veruscript.com/ [4] https://www.openlibhums.org/ [5] https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that-ca...

Yup, there are lots of startups and new players trying to change the way publishing works. I think the focus on tools is misplaced (and is often the tack that startups try to take) because it discounts the cultural factors at play in the industry. I'm incredibly interested to see if the Open Library of Humanities can really take off, because essentially that's the same subscription model, but flipped a bit (universities join as members). Anyway, I love that there are all these moves in the industry, but what I was saying before is just that nothing yet has shown that it can be successful (the only real change that I'd argue has proven success is OA publishing via author fees).

To your point about OA just shifting the costs from subscription to publication costs, that's entirely true. But that feels like a more honest business model to me. You provide a service, someone finds value in that service and pays you for it. The pricing is transparent (as opposed to the current bundle pricing that's different from institution to institution). It just feels cleaner. But yes, it still costs money. And that's where I'm arguing that that's because it's a service that people value that costs money to operate. In my view moving to APCs instead of subscriptions better aligns everyone's incentives. The author is the customer (although even now in an APC world the author doesn't really pay, it's the funding agency).

I'm most enthusiastic about OLH too, although I do believe that tools can _help_ there to have it take off.

And I see where you're coming from with APCs, but that's not the model we're moving towards, I'm afraid. Rather, big publishers and governments are like appear to be going to the Big Deal route once again, meaning that APCs still don't align with the service being provided. There's always more to publish, and thus Big Deal APCs can again be somewhat arbitrarily raised, just like subscription costs were.

Sometimes echo chambers amplify silly noise, sometime they just work because they reflect the truth.

HN is biased toward CS and CS researchers know that papers on deep learning algorithms, papers on computer vision research, are almost all published for free.

Reputation and testable software replace peer review advantageously. Researchers want citations, and being behind a paywall hinders that.

> So why aren’t there millions of publishers springing up to publish articles for $30 a pop (or even better - free!)?

Because we only need one. ArxiV has 1,303,895 papers online, for free. Drafts are enough for serious research and collaboration to happen.

And this is not limited to CS. Here is what Krugman, a well published, very cited, a Nobel prized economist says about this:

> Now, these working papers have long since become more than working papers used to be in the days of yore, largely because publication takes so long. For decades, the journals have basically been tombstones — places that validate your work, that you can cite when seeking tenure, but not where people keep up with what’s happening now. Working papers have long been where the active discussion takes place. A case in point: I released this paper in working paper form in 1988; by the time it was formally published in 1991, there was already a huge derivative literature, which I ended up citing in the published version.

[1] https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/22/understanding-t...

> and so far nothing has done much to dislodge the journal

That is because it is a racketing scheme: to make real research, universities have to make deals to access the stash of old papers kept behind firewalls. These deals will often have discounts if they publish their papers on this publisher.

That is taking a monopoly position as the proof that their product is superior.

> These deals will often have discounts if they publish their papers on this publisher.

I've never heard of such a scheme.

But on to your larger point: one thing I'd say is that the needs of academics varies greatly from field to field. There are reasons CS works totally differently than lots of other fields. There's a reason arXiv started in physics. Fields with logically provable assertions and testable algorithms are a lot easier to assess the quality of the content without relying on the peer review and journal acceptance signaling effect (although in CS the conference acts as that signaling effect just as strongly I'd argue).

Preprint servers are great, and certainly provide value and are a piece of the puzzle. In some fields (CS, Math, Physics) that can be a pretty large piece of the puzzle. But in many other fields there's a much greater need for expert curation and vetting.

> But in many other fields there's a much greater need for expert curation and vetting.

Let's remind something that is too often forgotten: peer review, while still useful, is NOT paid by the publisher. It is done for free by the peers. Yes, the publisher manages that and gets paid to organize it. The complex, high-educated job of peer-review is done for free, the automatizable, simple job of passing emails around is paid. Don't worry, I am sure we can find university staff or even a simple emailing script that can replace this function easily.

I think that the reason it started with CS is much more mundane: computer scientists are much more likely to know that hosting a PDF is very easy and costs zero, and will probably be more confident in using tools like LaTeX.

Nothing quite screams "competition" than a product with an order of magnitude in price differential.

No. Do the right thing here.

If the order of magnitude differential you're referring to is my rough range of costs of $500 - $5,000 per article, then there's a lot to dive into there. The reason for that range is that we're talking about very different products at the ends of that spectrum.

On the low end you have journals that intentionally screen only for scientific soundness and will publish anything, across all fields, that meets basic scientific rigor. And I don't intend that description to come off as sounding negative. I think there's an important role for that kind of publishing. Some of the publishers in this space are PLOS, PeerJ, and Springer Nature with Scientific Reports. As an incredibly rough rule of thumb, these types of journals accept about half of the articles that get submitted.

Then on the high end you have journals focused on exclusivity and only publishing the most impactful science. So that's the Cells and Natures and Sciences of the world (and OA journals like eLife). They reject most of the submissions, and so the cost is far higher on a per published article basis because they do a lot of work to throw away most of the articles.

These are very different services being offered.

> After all, the pirates have long since been chased out of the music business (Gapper, 2017).

Did somebody tell the pirates?

That quote is plain wrong. The pirates weren't chased out of the music business. While they have declined, they still exist (like you said).

Why have they declined? Because free was out-competed by paid options. Spotify/Netflix/iTunes etc is a better experience than free, where the value of the experience is greater to the user than its cost.

If publishers want to come out of this alive, they have to start providing more value than some dude running a server out of their basement could.

Getting any technical books even for money before Borders and now Amazon arrived was almost impossible. I used to go to DC's Library of Congress to get papers on garbage collection. Publishers freaked out over Xerox machines during the 80's. Financial windfall incentives were never good reasons to study or design. Broke lesser universities mostly funnel noise into our pools of research. Silly entertainment fictions and games are more valuable in dollars. Information asymmetries on taxpayer subsidized research was both unjust and leveraged for cascading abuses. Non-monetizable riches are the HIGH CLASS problems our civilization needs. We can solve that "problem" forever.

Open Access will always win, the question is how to take content to the next level. For example providing free open access to content is the product Google, Yahoo, FaceBook offer. The real question is how to take content, music, novels, academic papers, etc. into the value chain.

Artists will always produce inspiring things, they get paid however only when that inspiration creates value, so the question is how to measure that value and return to the creator of value. This seems simple enough – measure, gather, settle, return. For example, our system of transportation paid for by the community of interest – yet it returns value in the form of supporting a supply chain. Indirect, but successful.

There are a lot of faulty, manipulated or statistically underpowered studies out there. Some are doing real damage and the only way to stop it is to look at the details and discredit them.

Worse there are people out there who specialize in selective quoting and manipulating our understanding of science. Case in point "The plant paradox" book telling everyone that egg yokes reduce cholesterol and citing a paper which said the exact opposite: https://youtu.be/7NT4q_5dfLs?t=216

People wielding science have a lot of power - without transparency there is no accountability.

Can we not just have the law changed and buy them all out? Like ending slavery.

I am very much in favor of open access, but there is one service that these publishers could definitely provide that would definitely be a value-add: replication. I can imagine a prestigious journal or publisher using the money they've collected to sponsor studies that replicate results. I need to think more on how this model could work such that piracy doesn't circumvent it, but I think there is definitely a need for more replication studies and prestigious publishers have an incentive to ensure that their studies are replicable.

> prestigious publishers have an incentive to ensure that their studies are replicable

If only. Prestige (or at least, a high Impact Factor) correlates somewhat with more retractions. Which is relatively straightforward to explain: "prestigious" is where people go with novel, exciting results that have a higher chance to be cited more often, but those are exactly the type of results that have more chance of being inaccurate, exaggerated, and just prone to regression to the mean.

You are hopelessly naive if you think for profit publishers would ever do that.

It's not necessarily a concept relegated to the publishers. Just a potential revenue model for replication.

Pay to read an article? No, but I'd pay to talk to somebody who understood it, or who could answer questions about it. Is that a viable extra service that the publishers could move into?

1. Go to the library of a public university

2. Download all the articles you want to a USB stick and print them at work.

3. Profit!!!

Downvoted? I thought that this was relevant to the whole publisher issue myself. They provide zero incremental value and serve as little more than incremental friction towards accessing their content freely. Notice that step 2 was not upload to scihub.

Peer review, the last thing that they did provide, seems to be undergoing disruption by crowdsourced attempts at replicating results.

> Download all the articles you want

Problem 1: 5 hours round trip

Problem 2: they only have about 2/3 of the papers I want.

Problem 3: I save what I need and get home and start reading. Then there's another layer in the citation tree. Oh well, go in tomorrow, another 5 hours, and get that one, maybe.

Or, to on scihub for the research we taxpayers paid for already.

1. You usually need to be a student or staff member to be able to do that.

2. Few universities have access to all journals - it's too expensive.

Not at state university campuses. I do this all the time at UC campuses. In fact I've been doing it for the better part of two decades since I left academia. And if I wanted to pay $60 or so annually, I could even borrow books.

Ironically, I've worked with academia and government labs on two major projects and because I don't have an official academic email address, I can't even get a researchgate account without paying.

Peer review is already mostly done by volunteer researchers and there are a bunch of nonprofit journals out there that organize peer review without passing it on to a for-profit journal.

The only value that the for profit journals still provide is the prestige of the journal, which has built up over the years.

While the analogy to musical recording publishers does not fully compare to the scientific publishing in question here, I'd like to point out the similarity to start-up funding, venture capitalism et al: It's quite funny how some will argue against music lables on a site like this. At least the vetting and fostering part should apply to scientific publishing, too.

> brought forth a roar of policies and mandates that aim to oblige authors to change their publishing habits

Right. Blame the authors. Not, say Elsevier, who demands authors remove their own research from their own sites and charges exorbitant prices for access to journals.

> Now, some European countries are trying a new approach: to demand of the major publishers nationwide open access contracts, such as Projekt DEAL in Germany

Indeed. Because it's not the authors who are to blame.

- In July 2015, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) announced a plan to start boycotting Elsevier, which refused to negotiate on any Open Access policy for Dutch universities

- In December 2016, Nature Publishing Group reported that academics in Germany, Peru and Taiwan are to lose access to Elsevier journals as negotiations had broken down with the publisher

etc etc. etc.

"What I find startling ... [that] 15 years on from the Budapest Open Access Declaration, a pirate site is needed at all." asks the author of the article. Why, indeed.

> Sci-Hub, which is self-reporting more than 60 million articles freely available (Sci-Hub, 2017) and could have harvested nearly all scholarly literature (Himmelstein, Romeo, McLaughlin, Greshake, & Greene, 2017) – if true, Sci-Hub has single-handedly won the race to make all journal articles open access.

So... WHY IS THIS A BAD THING?

> Set against this are the combined efforts of stakeholders in scholarly communications who, after two decades, have managed only to get around half the world's research articles open, with the rest still behind a paywall 3–4 years post-publication

WHY ARE THEY SET AGAINST THIS?

> For books, despite initiatives like Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN), Knowledge Unlatched, and Open Book Publishers, progress has been glacial. At the time of writing, there are just over 8,000 titles listed in the Directory of Open Access Books (http://www.doabooks.org/), which – considering that Springer alone offers nearly 280,000 titles from its online bookshop – suggests that the proportion of books published open access has yet to reach 2%.

"What I find startling ... [that] 15 years on from the Budapest Open Access Declaration, a pirate site is needed at all." asks the author of the article.

.... and then he goes on blame authors, and only authors.

> On the author side, peer review management, copyediting, and language services could be offered along with services to promote the publications and make them more accessible to non-technical audiences.

Peer review is already done mostly for free. Why does he keep blaming the authors?

Surprisingly, after spending the entire article vilifying the authors, the author of the article reaches this conclusion: " Critically, only one actor is needed to start this process of unbundling: the publisher. In making a basic, legal version free for anyone to read, gratis open access is achieved at a stroke, and it would start to make the pirates redundant."

orly?

Excellent post. I'd add two things (quoting TFA, not you):

> copyediting

In my experience, that's a bad joke. The last paper I had edited by professional Springer editors came out with more errors that I had put in. The process achieved the exact opposite of what it was meant to achieve.

> when allowed, just 13% of authors posted green versions on their institutional repository, and allowed or not, just over half posted full-text versions on ResearchGate

Besides the factor mentioned in the article, that universities are bad at communicating their services to their own employees, there is also the fact that these institutional repositories simply suck. They suck because they are a large heap of "not-invented-here", they suck because they are bureaucratic and usability nightmares. But even without all that, and even 20 years into the age of Google, one centralized repository is easier to search and explore than 1000 little ones.

Authors know this, which is why they prefer putting their work literally anywhere else. This is not about aversion to change, it's about aversion to bad systems.

I don't think the author was "blaming". It's more like explanation the situation: in the end, it's authors who get to decide where to publish their work, even though they're influenced by external factors. I think it's unfair to assume ill intent on the part of the author of this article here.

It's also rather easy, although outside of the scope of TFA, to consider why _reliance on_ Sci-Hub is a bad thing. First of all, it's illegal, and thus unstable. Who knows when it might disappear, but we better have a plan before then. Second of all, it's an unreliable service by itself, ran pretty much by a single person. How devastating that can be could recently be observed when she blocked access to everybody in Russia because she felt insulted by a few Russian researchers.

Yes, it's great that some people have access now that otherwise wouldn't have, and who can use that access to do great things. But I think it's relatively straightforward that it would have been preferable if that access was provided directly by the publisher.

(And the quote to which you replied "Why are they set against this" said that not enough articles have been made open - I think you'd like to see more open as well?)

I'm sorry if you think I am blaming authors in this article, but I'm not. In fact I am not blaming anyone for the failure of OA, I blame the challenges around change. I then suggest a different approach that might reduce the amount of change needed, reckoning publishers might start the ball rolling by making content free to read. Toby Green

Does this really matter to people trying to publish and get recognition? I know for a fact that professors, like any author are touched when people discuss their work.

I've never heard of anyone first asking where they got the article from or if they paid for it.. Research is hard enough without worrying about the bean counters.

It's simple. Stop selling journals and host conferences instead. People are still willing to pay for conferences even if the papers are published open access. The gatekeeping role played by journals can be replaced by conferences.

Love how these parasites appropriate words like "fairness" and define the scope of all possible ethical options within the bounds of whatever business model is profitable for them...

... bah

Did anyone actually read to the end before unloading the acerbic comments?

This article is obviously targeted to the people involved in publishing who care only about the profit model part and not of the science part. I presume that's why it reads like a first year essay in some economic degree.

As an occasional consumer of research papers I see nothing wrong of the conclusion in the end:

"I suggest that we might be encouraged by the airline industry and unbundle the product. This would make all content free to read, answering the plea that the results of publicly funded research be available to the public,"

The title here and many comments are based on a misunderstanding: the article is not about _open access_ beating closed access, the article is about _piracy_ beating proper open access.

The question is: we've spent so many years trying to make sure published research free to access, trying different models [1] to make it happen, with only very limited success. How come Sci-Hub is taking off so well, and what can we do to free articles from paywalls legally?

[1] https://medium.com/flockademic/how-open-can-open-access-be-c...

> We've failed: open access is winning and we must change our approach

"What do you mean, "we", white man?"

The job of the journals is in providing middle-man services for scientists. Everyone loves to hate middle men, but sometimes you can't do without them. The best way to trade equities is on a stock exchange. Similarly, the best way to prove that you're a scientist of the caliber that publishes in Nature or Science is to publish in Nature or Science.

The people who accept/reject your paper are mostly volunteers [1], so that service alone doesn't justify the prices.

And if you take a look around this thread, the other services really aren't that much better.

[1] https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/75147/do-peer-r...

The people who sell or buy my shares of stock don't work for the stock exchange either. That's what makes the exchange a middle man.

One of my frustrations is that scientific papers decades old are still locked behind a paywall - so while I might voluntarily donate something if I find the content useful - I'm not for example willing to pay 40 dollars to find out if an article that is 60 years old is interesting or useful - but I might pay 1-2 dollars after the fact. I totally get paywalling say.. anything newer than 5 years - I don't get the point of paywalling something 40-50-60 years old.

You're not the target market. A person with a corporate credit card is willing to pay that much to read it, in certain industries.

Any sane bean counter should be able to work out a way to segment the market, like every subscription service ever, but it would require distributor content control, like DRM or streaming.

The old stuff is worth much more than new, quality has dropped a lot since the 1940s as research becomes more and more industrialized.

Unless of course you are at the edge of some field. Then the new stuff is a must.

No, I mean the vast majority of what is getting published these days does not contain useful information (very often it is worse than that, and is misleading). Reading papers from back then, almost every paper was worthwhile in some way. I think it also has to do with the ease of publishing.

I definitely have issue with the fact that so many papers are behind Paywalls, and I don't really have a problem with SciHub, since I think research should be open, but don't most of the major professional organizations/communities give you a Spotify-like access to papers?

I know my ACM membership, which is ~$200 a year has given me access to a ton of compsci papers. Maybe ACM is the exception on this?

Journal access through society membership is like needing a subscription service for every record label. I do a lot of reading about solar power technologies. Relevant articles are published in journals of the IEEE, ACS, IOP, RSC, OSA, APS, AIP... and a bunch of non-society journals too.

Fuck yeah. This is fantastic.

I'm not sure many people who have commented on this article actually read the entire thing through. I think it was a very insightful article on the vertically integrated business of scientific study that was the issue, and the suggestions as they relate to the airline industry as something that I hadn't seen spelled out in such a detailed manner before.

Cody Doctorow's Information Doesn't Want to Be Free is a good read about this.

https://archive.org/details/InformationDoesntWantToBeFree

The comparison to the music industry omits that other than music, science tends to be funded by governments.

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