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Comment by Frost1x | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see a pre-print database shared between all the major federal funding agencies which required any publications that go behind pay walls to share a corresponding pre-print that's publicly accessible for any paywalled publications. Let state and other private entities opt into joining the share repository.

I get it. Editing and reviewing costs money for journals. That's fine, let them monetize their improved versions but let the tax payers decide if they care to pay for those services or not as opposed to digging around for a researchers public preprint if they maintain one or being forced to dig through Sci-Hub and the like.

arXiv sort of fills this role and is growing in popularity but it's not mandated, centralized for all domains,, or promoted by the federal government which would push such an effort to the critical mass needed for larger adoption.

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I don’t think legislation is needed for that. Many publishers already allow you to publish your pre-print. Examples (leaving out some restrictions, but I think these are the gist of the policies)

https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/sharing#preprint:

“Preprint

Authors can share their preprint anywhere at any time.

If accepted for publication, we encourage authors to link from the preprint to their formal publication via its Digital Object Identifier (DOI). Millions of researchers have access to the formal publications on ScienceDirect, and so links will help your users to find, access, cite, and use the best available version.

Authors can update their preprints on arXiv or RePEc with their accepted manuscript.”

https://www.springer.com/gp/open-access/preprint-sharing/167...

“Springer journals encourage posting of preprints of primary research manuscripts on preprint servers, authors’ or institutional websites, and open communications between researchers whether on community preprint servers or preprint commenting platforms.

[…]

Authors may choose any license of their choice for the preprint including Creative Commons licenses.”

So, if you know the title of a paper, you often can find a preprint, if the authors are willing to make the effort to put them on a site.

> I get it. Editing and reviewing costs money for journals.

Are you sure? I'm sure previous posts on here made it very clear that they're peer reviewed for free.

Peer-review is free. Editing and Lay-out etc is done with the journal (not much though as they supply latex templates for your work). So there is some cost associated with this.

I actually prefer the layout on arxiv over actual journals and recently was kind of surprised how the manuscript management system changed my layout more than just my preprint pdf.

I think the layout costs could be reduced to near zero (ie, enough to be paid through the charity that funds preprint) with no negative impact.

Editing is useful, I think. Although I don’t anything about the current costs or necessary costs.

Elsevier's ScienceDirect platform publishes over 500,000 articles a year, across 4,300 journals, providing over 18 million documents and 42,000 e-books, and serving over 18 million unique monthly page views (https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/re...). Everything published goes through a process of peer review, editing, layout, final review, etc, and then access to the publication is maintained in perpetuity for thousands of institutions around in about a hundred countries.

Here are their pricing policies: https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/pricing and their other policies, which gives you an idea what else is involved with managing journals: https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies

So, yeah, journals do have costs. I am not defending those costs. But it is worth pointing out that there's more to publishing than a free peer review and uploading it to GitHub.

I haven’t heard of any reviewer that was compensated for a review, though I once won a reviewer award that had a small honorarium.

Editing is generally a paid service — the journal will not correct your typos or your prose. They will find incomplete reference data and ask you to fix them, and that’s about it

Reviewing doesn't cost money for journals. Scientists do it for free. As for editing, don't know how much papers improve by that beyond a very few select journals.

I don't know how, but the Zotero Connector usually retrieves the submitted paper when I don't have access to the article.

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