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Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

There seems to be an even more effective solution to closed journals than just telling scientists that if they take money their paper needs to be in an open journal.

Also tell them that when they apply for funding only scientific research which is available in open journals will be considered.

You'd then get people not only submitting new research in open journals, but making all their backlog available as well to increase their odds of getting funding.

That would chip away even more at the moat of companies like Elsevier since presumably much of their funding is from universities who'll need access to historical research for a long time.

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One problem this does is it shifts the costs of this to individual projects.

In my field, the average OA field is probably around $3000.

Assuming a five year project that produces 5 papers a year (not unreasonable), you get $75,000.

That's almost exactly what it costs, with salary, tuition, and fringe, to support two graduate students. So funders would have to accept getting less productivity from the same projects.

It also favors large labs with senior PIs that have the funding to absorb those costs.

Exactly, this is a major issue that non-academics always miss when talking about OA. The replacement to charging readers seems to have become a shift of costs to researchers, with an expectation they'll have lots of grants that are willing to pay huge publishing fees.

The only effective way I see to get around this is for granting agencies to start putting massive caps on what they are willing to pay for journal articles. If they mandate $200 max per article, no one is going to be able to afford a $5000 article anymore. Journals would be forced to adapt.

Your lab only has to pay grad students $7,500 a year? Seems like that might be the number that’s out of whack in the equation. To be fair, I live in the Bay Area, where $7,500 only gets you like 3-4 months rent.

^For a year. Which is still a significant loss, but yeah.

The OA is a scam. Publishing on Arxiv or putting the article on github, are much better free alternatives.

Yeah...see neither one of those is going to let me keep my job or secure more funding, so no.

Also, putting something on Github or Arxiv isn't publishing. Peer review or it didn't happen.

Yes, but this too is difficult. Funders outsource the decision of whom to fund to other academics, and despite quite a few of them already encouraging them to ignore things like the Journal Impact Factor and have signed DORA [1], old habits die hard.

[1] https://sfdora.org/

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