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Comment by spystath | Hacker News Reader

In comparison several European countries are increasingly mandating that publicly funded research should be open access. Why this simple concept would elude the US government is beyond me.

However Open Access is not panacea. Most of the times it just moves the cost from the subscriber to the author. The open access costs are equally extortionate for several journals in the ballpark of £2000 for a single article. As a result publicly funded grants must also include a quite significant budget for publishing costs further inflating the already bloated administrative overhead of research programmes. So you either pay the journals to open up your article or pay for a subscription. It does increase visibility and accessibility of research but, still, we are not quite there yet.

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> However Open Access is not panacea. Most of the times it just moves the cost from the subscriber to the author.

I feel lucky to work in a field where journals are OA, but authors do not have to pay to publish. Our major journals are published by learned societies that were founded with endowments large enough to cover publication costs in perpetuity. In fact, that’s how a lot of journals used to be published before big publishers, like Elsevier and Springer, convinced those societies to entrust them with the journals, claiming it would make things easier for everyone.

Out of curiosity, what's the field? In physics nothing is particularly open-access but that doesn't matter because everything with any significance at all gets put up on arxiv six months before publication.

Don't know about OP. In my experience a lot/most Computational Biology papers are Open Access.

I can second this. I've had a much better experience in Computational Biology compared to other fields wrt paper access.

For its conferences, ACM SIGPLAN asks the authors to pay for the open-access fee if possible, but will cover it if the author cannot afford it.

Well, it does matter somewhat: authors still publish in journals at the traditional publishers, and universities still subscribe to it, wasting research funds in developed countries and making the barriers to participation higher for researchers in emerging economies.

>>but authors do not have to pay to publish

My company has to pay to publish in our preferred journal of open access (PeerJ). I gladly pay for lifetime memberships for all of our authors, which is pittance and affords lifetime publication rights with no additional fees.

But we do pay. Most OA journals do have fee waivers and are very liberal with them, though.

PeerJ is different, though, in that you pay through lifetime memberships rather than a new fee every time you want to publish an article. Their fees are also substantially lower than those of the traditional publishers.

No question. I support PeerJ to the fullest extent and the price is more than fair. (It's actually unfair, honestly, it's far too low.)

But there is a fee. And it's important for supporters to be honest so it doesn't appear one-sided, so, here I am.

> Why this simple concept would elude the US government is beyond me.

The NIH, the single biggest funder of research in the US, has an open access mandate.

The single biggest funder of research in the world.

In reality the authors and editors do 90% of the work and are not paid. If the articles are electronic then the "publishing" costs are minimal. No real reason for everything to be open access (and I mean real open access, not charging authors).

True, those who do the real work doesn't get paid, but the ones who publish it gets paid.

Even simpler concepts like "passing a budget" or "vet your staff before hiring" elude the U.S. government these days so I really can't expect them to even comprehend the concept of open access journals.

Intentional or not, pay-to-publish also acts as a barrier-to-entry for less well-funded research groups.

This is a very real thing - a open access paper or two per year is, for example, a non-trivial amount of my startup funding.

Many OA journals have fee waivers.

Said fee waivers are often for fairly specific requirements, and "I'd rather spend the money on something else" isn't among them.

> For instance, in 2013, the Obama administration mandated that copies of research conducted through federal agencies must be uploaded to free repositories within 12 months of publishing.

All federally funded research in the US is mandated to be open access.

> Why this simple concept would elude the US government is beyond me.

At this point the US government pretty much entirely works for monied interests. It has waxed and waned over the years but for the past thirty years or so, it has strongly waxed.

> Why this simple concept would elude the US government is beyond me.

Money.

Does money not exist in Europe?

I'm pretty sure we have that thing here too.

I suspect politicians in Europe are less dependent on private contributions.

Europe has wider variation in political corruption (less corrupt in Germany, more corrupt in Romania). Whereas US politicians always seem to be moderately corrupt, wherever they come from.

Kind of you to put it that way. 'Always' is too blanket, but those who are not are clearly diminishing in number. (They ... 'retire'.)

There's no need to pay a publisher £2000. The authors can self-publish.

Self-publishing is not without its problems.

Peer review, while not perfect, guarantees that the text has been reviewed by quality researchers. Journals have an interest in filtering bad publications, if only to keep their reputation.

In contrast, a self-published paper has no guarantee of quality, simply because everyone can do it. An author's reputation is often a proxy to assess a publication's quality, but this is clearly bad for new researchers.

I think there are good alternatives - my last publication costed around $300, which were used to pay for the conference where I presented it.

Ah, so we simply create a protocol that transparantly breaks down the peer review process into a rainbow of gradients thereby allowing the desired process of review by what you call quality reseachers. Such protocol could allow a review-for-free mechanism that could be time consuming and it could build a fund for the review process. Arguably the review process needs not to be finished at any time. It is probably big fun to revisit the process in the licht of later findings. Lastly but not least the protocol could help establish a name for reviewing scientists who just happen to do a lot of reading. A (large) bit like github does for programmers.

Not if I want to keep my job come review time.

Self-publications and 'gray literature' are generally deemed worthless and often even considered to contribute a large amount of negative value to a CV. To put things simple, you'll loose your job.

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