The War to Free Science
vox.com
vox.com
Definitely citation needed on the “(illegal)”.
FYI, this site is very useful and keeps track of the ever-changing sci hub links: https://sci-hub.now.sh/
Also, the actual DNS system doesn't have a way of redirecting you to another site when the record has been censored, so it's not very resilient in the first place.
Relevant similar site: https://dark.fail
>Put another way: Publishers are still going to get paid. Open access just means the paychecks come at the front end.
Firstly, the fees imposed by journals are thousands of dollars, which is far too much for many researchers to pay. It would seemingly largely prevent the publication of independent research within such journals.
This was mentioned in the article:
>In fact, many academics still don’t publish in open access journals. One big reason: Some feel they’re less prestigious and lower quality, and that they push the publishing costs on the scientists.
However, the article seemingly (and contradictorily) earlier implies that Gold OA is a solution to pushing the cost onto the researchers:
>Academics are not paid for their article contributions to journals. They often have to pay fees to submit articles to journals and to publish.
However, under Gold OA this is only exacerbated, with large fees being everywhere on the publication-end. The readers don't have to pay, but now the authors do.
Additionally, this may create another pro-industry publication bias, as industry-funded studies may be more likely to have the money to publish in pay-to-publish journals, and this apparently has now been dubbed "e-publication bias" (bottom of https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/340/7753/Letters.full.pdf, also see http://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l1544).
Lastly, the article mentions predatory publishing, however fails to note that this phenomena is caused by Gold OA in the first place. In fact, it is sometimes specifically called "predatory open-access publishing". The idea behind predatory publishers is that Gold OA incentivizes publication (as they now get paid per-paper), leading them to seek out and accept as many papers as possible regardless of quality.
While open science certainly is in-line with my views, I'm not convinced that Gold OA is a good solution here.
Thus, when OA advocates use the term Gold OA, that gets interpreted the way you do above - whereas they usually intend for the fees to be low or non-existent, for authors. Some have started to use Diamond or Platinum OA for that, but it's hard to get that to stick now.
The point is: there are definitely Open Access models possible where publishing does not entail thousands of dollars of publication costs. This has been proven by many quality journals already.
Still, the cheapest in my field is AIAA journal at $2000 per article. That's still outrageous. Given my understanding of what happens behind the scenes I find it hard to believe any journal actually needs that much money to stay profitable.
I'd be happy to pay an order of magnitude less, say $200, if that could ensure the article stays online for a long period of time. I don't know anything about starting new journals, but I hope competition helps this situation. I might start a journal someday...
I'm not going to say that they don't add any value, but the existence of overlay journals like Discrete Analysis, and other high-quality "pure play" open-access journals like JMLR, and JAIR, etc., suggest to me that it's possible to create a journal system where very little money is required on either end. I think our aspiration should be to see most scientific publishing move to such a model.
This issue could be solved over night if the USFG (NSF/NIH/DoD) stepped in and said "all publications supported by our grants must be published open access and we'll pay no more than $N/page in publishing fees."
Outright bans make open access harder; editing+publishing with reasonable quality and archival levels of access guarantees can be cheap but it's never free.
Just limit it to a very reasonable $/page. Even upper bounding it at some obscene amount like $10/page would be a vast improvement and a completely trivial expense (you don't want to know what plane tickets to IJCAI cost this year...)
To clarify, I'm saying any research funded by the NSF should have this requirement imposed on all publications regardless of funding source. I.e., DON'T say "NSF $ can't be used for more than $X in publication fees", say "NSF $ can't be used AT ALL if you ever pay more than $X in publication fees".
Calling Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and all others : please make science Free, Forever, For Everybody.
There's no bigger creator of human development opportunities than free science (imho).
More than a decade? ago, Bill Gates freed the Feynman lectures, only to lock it in Microsoft's Adobe Flash-competing technology, silverlight.
Now do it properly : make it free as in beer and free as in freedom. Yes Bill, you pay everything, we nothing.
Unfortunately, it's not a problem you can solve just by throwing money at it. It's primarily an incentive problem, and the only influence the Gates Foundation has on that is through its funding of research. In that regard, it's doing very well.
That's blaming the victim. It's not the academics who are prestige-obsessed, it's the universities that assess and rank their staff by publication counts within such journals. Most academics I know just want to keep their job.