The MIT Press launches Direct to Open
mitpress.mit.edu
mitpress.mit.edu
The HN guidelines specifically ask you not to rewrite titles unless they are misleading or linkbait: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I've changed the URL from https://www.mitpressjournals.org/action/showPublications, which doesn't explain anything, to the press release which, although it's a press release, sort of does. Nevertheless it's hard to figure out what exactly is being announced here.
Maybe all the MIT publications do the same?
Springer did this awhile ago for a weekend, not its entire catalog but many books were free to download. It was wonderful, but brief. From down thread, https://mitpress.mit.edu/blog/mit-press-launches-direct-open
I think it is important for folks to recognize how hard this must have been and how many heated verbal battles were exchanged inside of MIT over this. Thank You. And thank Aaron, always a champion in spreading the world's knowledge to the most people possible. We should empower everyone as much as we can with the bits we have available.
Folks should check some fun journals like
Computer Music Journal https://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/comj
Evolutionary Computation https://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/evco
Add your own below!
Fortunately someone managed to scrape the entire thing and there's a 500Gb torrent out there with the full content of all the journals and conference proceedings.
I don’t think there’s much hope of the commercial journals owned by Elsevier or Springer opening up, but I do hope that the trend of journals flipping (where the entire editorial board resigns and forms a similarly named open access journal) will increase.
Perhaps another problem is that in those fields that are already closest to open access (say because they use the arxiv), there is less incentive for people to jot publish in commercial journals as everyone who matters will have already read the preprint in the arxiv.
That reason is people. Journals don’t just create themselves. Lots more happens to make it so than just having an email inbox to accept submissions.
You need to be able to fund the enterprise, and often you want bigger/popular journals to subsidize the really esoteric stuff that’s important intellectually to humanity but still requires a base number of people to run it independent of the sales. It would also be nice for these people to make real money for their time so people who are good at it could make a career of it.
Elsiver etc are a different beast as they’re companies disconnected from a larger university. So their self-preservation goals are quite different, and accordingly, their appetite for organizational profit versus covering expenses.
I don’t know about other fields but in mathematics the editors and reviewers are not paid (and I think this is the norm in science but not sure about medicine. I think sometimes the chief editor gets some relatively small payment). But it seems to me that these are the most valuable parts of the journal. So where is all the money going?
The journals don’t do copy-editing (anymore?) or if they do they are not very good at it. The journals also don’t do the formerly technical work of typesetting anymore, mostly just bunging papers into some kind of template and requiring authors to do half the work of following journal style.
I think the journals aren’t acting as some kind of spam filter before papers get to the (unpaid) editors, except maybe for the biggest journals.
I don’t really buy the argument that big journals fund the little ones because the little journals are given large price tags and libraries do not get the option to exclude them from subscriptions.
FWIW my theory about the large university press building for my university is that it contains a lot of printed material waiting for shipping, possibly contains (or was designed to contain) printing presses, and is enlarged by a business printing some (high school level) examination papers that are used by many schools internationally, though I’m not sure the press prints them and not some other business.
- The EIC is paid - not a huge amount, but a non-trivial amount. - Graphics work may be done to make figures conform to "house styles" - There is absolutely copy-editing done. Heck, I usually end up fighting with them about copy editing. - We don't use LaTeX, so papers need formatting (and generally, IMO, end up superior to those formatted via LaTeX templates)
Finally, for university presses for books, there are people who evaluate whether a book is worth pursuing, who coordinate peer review, who hound faculty who haven't turned their chapters in yet (something I'm guilty of), etc.
So this is the heavy-hitting work that's supposed to justify closing off knowledge except to those who can pay: because someone might see a paper that had insufficient formatting?
No wonder the reputation for closed-access journals is so thorougly poisoned, when this is exactly the kind of misdirected attention and gatekeeping that's killing it.
And ironically, I was discussing differences in field. The journal in question is open access.
But I don’t know how much they still do this.
Journals do sometimes advertise, and that can be expensive. It's also one way to get a large impact factor etc.
About university presses: I don't know how they're funded internally (despite being faculty at a university), but I would not be surprised if they have to fund themselves. It's hard to see student tuition dollars supporting a university press, nor can research dollars flow that way. It's possible some public funds (at state universities, at least) can be used to support university presses, I guess.
As someone who knows absolutely nothing about this: isn't that the kind of thing that can be easily outsourced? Today, even books can be printed and delivered in low volumes. Online printing shops compete for such jobs.
There is a significant movement against this now https://sfdora.org/read/ - and I hope it succeeds, but it's an uphill battle against a lot of systemic pressures.
[0] https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/research/digitalresearch/openac...
[1] https://www.openaire.eu/how-to-comply-to-h2020-mandates-for-...
As less and less high quality modern research ends up behind paywalls, the bargaining power of traditional journals diminishes.
A similar approach could be taken to prohibit publication in journals with embargo periods, i.e. paywalling for a couple of years before permitting open access. [0] For publicly funded research, that isn't acceptable either.
If such rules are applied consistently from all funding sources, the game would change quickly, by necessity. Collective bargaining where the government holds all the cards, essentially.
That's how I see it, at least. I'm not a researcher, and I'm not an expert on open access.
The current norm strikes me as plainly outrageous. Huge sums of tax money being handed over to publishers who make it their business to withhold tax-funded research from the people who funded it. It also strikes me as fixable. It's a tragedy of the commons, and the government has the power to force the matter and resolve the problem.
On the plus side, it looks like there's a real push to do this kind of thing. [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access#Embargo_periods
On a related note, reviewing work is highly skilled and usually unpaid. If (and that's a big if) we wanted to fix that, we'd have to make fees higher again.
I'd be ok with that. Off the cuff, the way I see it there are a few options:
1. [Perhaps acceptable] The party behind the submitted paper pays the reviewers for their efforts. This might be done via the publisher, but that's just detail. The reviewers' employers do not treat reviewing as a work activity, i.e. reviewing work is done out of hours.
2. [Acceptable] The reviewers' employers pay the reviewers, treating review work as a routine part of their scientific duties.
3. [Acceptable, likely preferable] (Combining 1 and 2) The reviewers' employers pay the reviewers, treating review work as part of their scientific duties. The party behind the submitted paper pays the reviewers' employers, in compensation for the time spent on reviewing. This has the advantage that reviewing work can be neatly accounted for by all parties, and that, ideally, reviewing work need not be viewed as an additional professional burden atop ordinary working hours. (Whether that's likely to really work out given general academic career pressures, I'm not qualified to say.)
4. [Unacceptable] The reviewers go unpaid for their efforts, and only do the work out of an economically perverse sense of noblesse oblige
Not really, and what work has to be done is typically done on a volunteer basis by academics.
- Occasionally, society-level journals are being expected to subsidize the society itself, in terms of the annual meeting, student scholarships, etc. They're often also outsourced to commercial publishers, because even fairly substantial societies are run on shoe-string staff.
- If you're NIH, Wellcome Trust or some other organization funded, there's a mandate that the manuscripts become open access after (typically) 12 months. That lessens the pressure somewhat to open up journals.
For that to make sense to me, I'd have to believe that Aaron died for his beliefs, or that his death caused others to take up his fight.
I don't believe either of these things are true.
Aaron died because he took his own life in the face of an overwhelming situation at the hands of a cruel system. Aaron's death did not further his cause. It was just a tragic combination of humans and inhuman actions.
Aaron was not a martyr. He was an idealistic but troubled good person who got ground up by forces he did not understand, and should never have had to learn.
It's a loss. His ideas and spirit live on in others, yes. But his death was not required or helpful, and he did not die for his cause. It was a senseless tragedy, but merely adjacent to his beliefs.
Do the work. Miss Aaron. Be inspired by him. But I don't believe he died in the service of something larger than himself. I think that take diminishes the real tragedy here, which is that humans like Aaron are sometimes victims of the systems that we create.
I can't wait for Elsevier to follow suit. /s
Elsevier's has plenty of ways to reinvent itself make money. Scopus is a good search engine and libraries would be wiling to pay for it unbundled from journal access.
>https://rapidreviewscovid19.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/jrlok92l/re...
>Reviewer 1 (Takahiko Koyama) | ◻ Reliable
>Reviewer 2 (François Balloux) | ◻◻◻◻ Misleading
>Reviewer 3 (Lee W Riley) | ◻◻◻◻ Misleading
Interesting
Time wise? Less easy.
In a way where it will be respected in the field, read, and attract quality submissions? Hard, unless it's an offshoot of something pre-existing.
I don’t even need to think that. I can just think that it’s “hard” to differentiate between organizations that are “good” at stopping suicides and those that are “bad” at it. Or, I might think that state of the art suicide prevention is prohibitively expensive, eg maybe it costs on average $1,000,000 to stop a single suicide.
Certainly, one may choose to research the institutions they donate to, if they don't trust them by name. That is not unique to suicide prevention, therefore it's an unnecessary qualifier in the current discussion.
Likewise, perhaps it's expensive. But even a single ad that reaches someone in need, leading to that person seeking professional help, is something.
I agree that there are many claims regarding “donations” that suffer from the same defect. But the fact that many claims have the same problem doesn’t indicate that it’s not worth pointing out the problem. In fact, quite the opposite possibly.
I think no one here understands what you are trying to say.
My position is that all actions have mostly unintelligible effects until demonstrated otherwise.