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Comment by tomrod | Hacker News Reader

Yes, due to allocation of property rights.

Cease to supply this system with the fruits of your research labors.

> Cease to supply this system with the fruits of your research labors.

Historically academics have felt forced to support this system, because for-profit journals are the high-prestige ones they must publish in in order to get tenure. This has changed for certain fields, but it isn’t as simple as just suggesting that one publish elsewhere.

It’s up to not only academics who publish articles, but also organizations that issue grants and tenure. Public policies to adjust their definitions of “prestige” or “quality” would help.

And these are mostly run by people that have not even heard of scihub, openaccess etc

Case in point: The ARC, the biggest Australian Research funding body, recently explicitly banned the mention of preprints in grants. You can't include your own arxiv/biorxiv/etc. preprints in your grants to show your work! To the ARC, that's unpublished work. I know a few mathematicians who exclusively publish on arxiv who were bitten by this change, the whole grant got rejected.

That is... profoundly idiotic and short-sighted.

which fields has this changed for?

What are some of the fields where this is changing?

For some fields the for-profit problem never happened at all. For example, in some branches of linguistics, history and archaeology the main journals have always been published by the same non-profit learned societies for decades (since the 19th century, sometimes). Prices for the hardcopy were always reasonable, and with the digital era, these journals became open access.

In other branches of those disciplines, I have seen that recently some big-name editors have founded new open-access journals with the express aim of gradually taking prestige away from for-profit journals. See here [0] (PDF).

[0] https://scholarsarchive.library.albany.edu/cgi/viewcontent.c...

Sure, but it's a divide-and-conquer problem. Academics have to mutually support each other rather than trusting everything to a competitive marketplace (which most of them seem to hate anyway).

Stop supporting a system you won't inherit.

One can publish online a pre-print for free, which is very close to the final version of the paper.

In my personal opinion the international community could do something like modify the Berne Convention/TRIPS (international copyright agreements signed by almost every country/WTO members respectively) to exclude copyright of academic papers.

The property rights in question are not natural rights, nor material rights. Sufficient political will seems like it could do it.

Finding politicians in power who will support human progress before profits might be hard! [/understatement]

Give me tenure and I'm on board.

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