Comment by dankohn1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dankohn1 | Hacker News Reader

I have so much respect for the editors who were willing to make this jump.

I've wondered if there is some cognitive dissonance between the strong feelings I have that scientific journals should be open access and my willingness to buy and use closed source software (even though I run an open source software foundation). But I don't think so.

Fundamentally, I think authors have the right to determine how their work is used. If they want it to be used and available as widely as possible, they should publish it under an open source license and in an open source journal. But when for-profit companies like Elsevier control the journals in which publication is necessary for getting tenure, they are restricting information flow and harming science with no countervailing benefits. Furthermore, many journal articles are supported by government grants, and it's just appalling to me not to have access to the results of research that I am paying for. (If not for https://sci-hub.tw/ obviously.)

I'm optimistic that the author-pays model of funding copy editing will work out and that for-profit journals will be seen in another couple decades as akin to leeching and phrenology.

> Fundamentally, I think authors have the right to determine how their work is used.

Fundamentally, I think TAX PAYERS have a right to access all funded research!

That's very true, but in practice these corporations argue that that particular paper is their copyright, not the research. Thus, just because the general public need to pay to access a particular document, that doesn't mean they are barred from the research.

Which is fine.

Just that the public should demand that all research using public money is done openly, so all data and papers are accessible to the public in perpetuity.

Researchers are welcome to refuse to accept that deal, just so long as they don't take any public money.

Simples.

Researchers dont get any money for writing papers in those journals, Infact, researchers have to pay to get their paper published in most of these journals.

Pay out of their research budget with your tax dollars

Not all researchers have thousands of dollars available in grants to cover the types of publishing fees that have become common as the burden of payment shifts from readers to researchers. Graduate students, postdocs or even professors may end up having to pay out of their own pocket to get a publication in a high-profile journal that is necessary to advance their career.

Or not. Or advance the money for a year and, maybe baby, recover the funds one year later... you would be surprised.

> Infact, researchers have to pay to get their paper published in most of these journals.

Is this true? Most Elsevier journals in mathematics (my field) do not have publication fees. In fact, I think of publication fees as one of the hallmarks of an open-access model.

For the most part, researchers would prefer to publish open access, and agree with your stance about public money 100%, but with the current state of things, it would have a negative effect on their careers. You have to publish in certain highly-regarded journals to advance.

In some countries this is basically enshrined in law: there's a big table of journals ranked from high to low, and you need a certain number of publications in the high-ranked journals to keep your job with a public institution. Many of the high-ranking journals are closed access, for-profit.

Wow, seriously? Which countries?

The first explicit reference I found was the Norwegian Scientific Index but I believe other countries have a similar system. Literally, each journal article is worth points, the points are divided among the coauthors, and then the points have a monetary value which is given in grants to the respective institutions.

http://blog.boletsis.net/level-1-level-2-publications-norweg...

> Wow, seriously? Which countries?

Pretty much any developed country. Research funding is guided by metrics and publishing is a very strong component. As anyone can create their own personal journal, only the leading and established ones count.

Laws are meaningless though USA has a law but it really just is a hurdle.

NIH Public Access Policy 2008 (Within 12 months the public must have access of all publicly funded research. (NIH = National Institute of Health)

The law is bellow:

"The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, that the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law."

The NIH Public Access Policy is an open access mandate, drafted in 2004 and mandated in 2008,[1] requiring that research papers describing research funded by the National Institutes of Health must be available to the public free through PubMed Central within 12 months of publication. PubMed Central is the self-archiving repository in which authors or their publishers deposit their publications. Copyright is retained by the usual holders, but authors may submit papers with one of the Creative Commons licenses.

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

Three times Congress has tried to over turn this rule and academic protest keep the law in place. Sadly I still think most don't know about it.

Most of the journals I publish in have a checkbox for NIH/CDC/HHS-related funding, and automatically put things in PubMed Central.

Ironically, it's only the CS/Math-type journals where there's lots of people doing OA advocacy where this is more of a pain because I have to remember to do it myself.

And from the researcher end, if it's not in PMC, I can't claim credit for it on grants.

So you're down with your medical records being made public in perpetuity for all intents and purposes?

Because if all my data needs to be made available, identifiable health data is part of that.

Researcher here. That argument is bullshit. Papers are the main method for researchers to communicate their findings. They're written by the researchers themselves, who are often funded by taxpayer dollars, and reviewed by other researchers for free. I hear that sometimes a publisher will do some copy editing at the end, but in my field there's nothing beyond some simple formatting checks.

Which is why you can find all of my "preprints" online.

It is incredibly silly that it's legal for taxpayer-funded research papers to be hidden behind a paywall, which sends money to a corporation that did not fund the authors of the paper.

Former Systems Librarian at a University. My budget was over $80,000 per year just to gain access to the journals. Before this happened we had journals out on racks and boxes with previous journals behind them for as many as I could cram there. Then I had these journals in a backroom which I would have someone go get something for a student maybe two times a month.

Usually the new Journals are not even available in digital for anywhere from 12 to 48 months. So we still had to buy the journals at full price (Looking at you Nature (It's over $100 a month) then pay thousands to get access to journals that would not have ever made a profit before.

Main reason I left the field is Librarian would defend these parasites and bad mouth Open Source projects. I would pay $150,000 for my content management system and portal for version releases and about $40,000 a year maintenance fee. It averaged about $0.50 a year per book to have them in a maintained database and public portal. These systems were absolutely garbage technically (I had to reboot my servers daily according to contract) and the interface was backwards. So glad I left what should have been a position to champion for fair use and equal access but found out that librarian for the most part were the police of copy right and closed source projects. Rant Over

> I hear that sometimes a publisher will do some copy editing at the end, but in my field there's nothing beyond some simple formatting checks.

By "some copy editing", what you surely mean is "a blind search and replace that introduces last-minute errors", which is the main effect of this copy-editing that I've seen.

I've actually had extremely good experiences with both copy editors and layout, including a journal - an Elsevier journal by checking - redoing a figure.

That's good to hear! It's probably my own fault for having fairly complicated TeX code for my files, but it's still frustrating.

It is also highly debatable whether it is a good use of taxpayer funds to cover thousands of dollars in page charges (which is not uncommon for many journals these days). Think how much money could go towards funding more postdocs, graduate students or researchers, but is instead spent paying page charges to journals...

> It is incredibly silly that it's legal for taxpayer-funded research papers to be hidden behind a paywall

I know at least for research funded by the Department of Energy, after 1 year any published articles become freely available regardless of the publisher's access policy (excepting classified material, of course).

https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/08/f18/DOE_Publ...

> Fundamentally, I think authors have the right to determine how their work is used.

In my view, to think that an individual is the sole author of his intellectual product is a bit egotistic, which is sort of normal given a prevailing culture of "you are what you make". In my opinion, my intellectual product is a product of everyone and everything that's influenced me. An important part of that influence was someone sharing.

Except that leeching has benefits

It does! I wondered if someone would point that out. (Though blood letting does not). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodletting

Blood-letting also has benefits in some cases! For example, venesection is a standard treatment for haemochromatosis: http://haemochromatosis.org.uk/haemochromatosis/treatment/

But he referred to the notion of how it was widley used in old times and didn't do anything.

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