Open-access publishing fees deter researchers in the global south | Hacker News Reader

Open-access publishing fees deter researchers in the global south

nature.com

58 pointselashri34 comments

The way that scientific publishing has evolved into a cartel-based business with insane barriers to entry has a lot of parallels to the healthcare industry in the US. The core problem with both is a disconnect between users and payers — in this case, readers vs. libraries.

What makes the whole situation bearable, in my opinion, is sci-hub. Nature or whoever can charge whatever prices they wish, it makes no difference to my point of access. Even during times when I have legitimate access, it’s still often simpler to just find a paper on sci-hub.

Thank goodness for pirates.

Towards the end of writing my Master's thesis, more often than not, I would go through sci-hub to get papers, the simple reason being that even if my university had paid for access to that specific journal, I'd have to jump through hoops to get it.

5-10 minutes jumping through hoops versus 30 seconds getting it on sci-hub. Easy choice.

Can you describe the process for getting access through your university? I'm curious what that experience is like

Either you need to log in 5o your universities bespoke portal that aggregates your providers, or you need to do some weird third party registration, and navigate a bunch of login flows on the slowest websites in eternity. Closest comparison is imagine you want to a watch a show on your laptop but you don't know if it's on netflix, prime or Disney.

Usually it is as simple as being connected through eduroam (the university wifi) or VPNing into the university network. Sometimes you have to log in to the university library portal and get it through there. Some journals want you to create accounts to access, and don't let you download, only read in the webviewer (without highlights or annotations of course).

My university would ask me to proxy my internet over their proxy servers to reach the papers legally, when I am not in the campus. It was such a painful process for non computer science students, as they would not understand how to make this work.

It will always be an uphill climb the further down on the hill you are. However, Academia doesn't need to keep making the hill taller.

The hardest part is those at the top have the most advantages. For example, ivy league institutes now pay for substantial editing before it makes it to the peer review stage. This increases the quality of the work, but other scholars at institutes without the same level of funding are now competing against a higher bar, reducing their total output. (If you can save 200 hours of work per paper, you can put another paper out.)

Money always imbalances the equation. This is yet another example. Unless institutions are willing to change the publication system, it will not get better, and it isn't in the interests in the institutions at the top to allow more competition.

> If you can save 200 hours of work per paper, you can put another paper out.

I guess that's an opportunity for those countries to focus on research quality instead of publication volume and sidetrack the entire issue.

But, well, they are not doing this. That's too bad.

This could be nice, as long as universities correspondingly stopped using paper counts as a measure of researcher productivity when doing hiring or tenure decisions.

Not only university hiring, but grant analysis also needs to change. This is something done top-down, not bottom-up. I guess that's why nobody is doing it.

Universities only use those metrics in lieu of actual proven results.

A genius with demonstrated novel, reproducible, experimental results in any of the hard sciences or engineering will likely not encounter much difficulty getting a tenure track position at even the most selective schools.

The really interesting question is why do so few researchers have novel, reproducible, experimental results?

However, having an editor that will engage with your work and provide expert feedback will make your work better, as well as save overall time.

It's not quality versus quantity - it's paying for expert assistance. This isn't cheating, mind you - it's something every one of us will do, given the option. However, wealthy institutions can pay for it, and other institutions cannot - that leaves the academic to either pay out of their own pocket (say, if they have a partner who is in our industry and can afford to), or go without.

> However, having an editor that will engage with your work and provide expert feedback will make your work better, as well as save overall time.

You mean something like peer review before submission, or you mean a formal editor? A formal editor will only add value to that document. You may communicate things better, but it won't improve what things you communicate.

> This increases the quality of the work, but other scholars at institutes without the same level of funding are now competing against a higher bar, reducing their total output.

Reducing output in exchange for quality doesn't sound like a particularly bad tradeoff, especially it's happening fairly naturally and as a response to a perceived lack of quality.

It doesn’t sound natural at all for a wealthy institution to use money to hide fundamental weaknesses of its researchers(namely the ability to articulate their own research to their peers) when a less wealthy institution cannot afford to do so.

Yeah, that's the way the commenter I responded to wants me to view it, but I'm skeptical of that way of looking at it. I view it as specialization, where two people each utilizing their strengths can accomplish more together than they would by simply aggregating their separate products. Why would I demand that someone who excels at research must necessarily be a fantastic writer, and why would I exclude a person who can make meaningful contributions to human knowledge but nonetheless needs help communicating? If results are freely shared (which is why open-access is so important!) science is not a competition because "less wealthy" and "wealthy" institutions but rather a collaborative process working toward shared goals.

I don't think it's cheating at all. These editors not only copy edit, but also engage with your work. It's a fantastic service that reduces time and increases quality - what's not to like?

However, when two Ph.D graduates are going up for a job, and the Harvard candidate has an additional paper or ten on the same or less effort, he has a leg up on the job market, and this may obscure the best researcher for the job. The committee is often not taking institutional inequities in account when looking for the best candidate.

While science is not a competition, the academic market for jobs has devolved into one.

If you look at it as the university itself generating the research output (university labs, editors, and other resources), then much more natural. It makes sense that a university with more money would be able to produce more research.

Ultimately "the top" doesn't mean anything if they cannot produce superior results as well. Katalin Karikó was shunned by academia with their moronic cliqueishness and scorn of mRNA research. Ultimately they will rot into irrelevance if they maintain such folly. Thinking that because you are the top you set the standard instead of setting the standard being why you are on top is dangerous.

The deep irony of this being published at nature.com, who charge over 10000usd in article fees.

It’s always sadly amusing when traditional publishers distribute pieces about flaws in open access publishing, preprints, SciHub, and other attempts to un-entrench them.

previous thread about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30081034

No wonder. It deters my colleagues in Spain (in my research area)… (Mathematics). I am sure those prices are way above anything imaginable in poorer countries.

Here's my tiny attempt at helping: https://observablehq.com/@iz/sci-hub

It checks for working mirrors. I included an iphone shortcut I made that also checks mirrors. Run the shortcut through the share sheet while on a page of an article you need. Feel free to ask for help if that's unclear.

I think you need to be careful and write that some mirrors aren't official and they put their own bitcoin wallet address in donation site.

but thank you for the help

Perfect. Thank you!

Also the shortcut is using an unknown app which doesn't show up when I click show in appstore.

I replaced the Open in Chrome step with Open in Safari. That should use the default browser either way, which I was unsure of when I created it.

Does that help?

Now it works perfectly. Thank you for that shortcut

Yet another case of academia going to hell. Every institution is morphing into a centralized monolith designed to exploit the researchers.

Is there a way to stop this? Some bright minds have been able to support themselves through fan donations or start businesses. Too bad that doesn’t scale.

It is a self inflicted hell really for academia. They are the ones who set the standards effectively by how they judge and cite based upon "prestige" instead of merits.

It is a matter of domains when it comes to scaling in research. There is far less of a need for a budget with software than say particle physics.

It's not like journals didn't charge publishing fees before. It always confused me why journals could get away with charging publishers to publish, then charge readers (or at least libraries and universities) for subscriptions.

I assume it evolved from charging publishers for typesetting and editorial work, etc, and charging readers for the physical copies.

Here's the paper: https://oa.mg/work/10.1038%2Fd41586-022-00342-w

Reply on news.ycombinator.com