Hacker News Reader

Comment by movingahead | Hacker News Reader

From a student point of view, this is great news. If you don't have a personal subscription to the digital libraries of IEEE/ACM, the amount of hoops that one has to go through to access a research paper, is apalling. I believe that a peer review system used by journals is beneficial, but putting the papers behind a paywall is obstructing access to knowledge.

If anyone has a reference which justifies the paywall charges, please share it.

View on HN

The peer review system isn't something that the journals provide. All the review work is done by academics who don't get paid a cent for it. Peer review could be done just as easily if papers were published on free web sites like arxiv.org.

I think "appalling" is a bit of hyperbole. I'm for open access, but students at almost every major university can get all the journal articles they want for free at their library. In addition, many/most school have a proxy system so the student can access these resources from home.

The situation is a lot worse for the general public, although even then many public libraries have subscriptions to the largest journals.

students at almost every major university can get all the journal articles they want for free at their library.

Some of us have finished school and left the academy, but would still like to read an journal article from time to time.

movingahead's comment started with "From a student point of view...", and that was the area I was discussing.

From context, he appears to mean "one who studies", rather than "one who's in school."

> although even then many public libraries have subscriptions to the largest journals.

Maybe public libraries in the largest of cities but I've never seen this in libraries in medium-sized (100,000-250,000 people) Massachusetts cities.

"for free at their library" really means paid for by a perhaps non-trivial portion of their tuition

The University of California has ~190k students, and pays $24.3M per year for online journals.

http://www.physorg.com/news195486711.html

Even if this cost were spread over just the students this would be only $100 per student per year. And given that the grant-funded professors use the journals orders of magnitude more, the student's proportional burden is probably less than a dollar. Yes, the cost should be zero, but we're talking about access to all the world's scientific knowledge. This cost is hardly "appalling".

That's only the case if you look at it from the supplier's perspective: "We're giving you so much! So you should give us every last penny you can afford," or (more hyperbolically) "It'd be a shame if something happened to your business here in our territory. Want insurance?" The research has already been paid for by its initial funding. Why should we have to pay an intermediary to access it?

In other words, the question is not how much access to all the world's scientific knowledge is worth, but whether it's acceptable for an entity that had no hand in creating that knowledge to control access to it.

I'm not arguing that this price is correct, just that the OP was over the top. (In fact, I'm a strong believer that the correct economic equilibrium is for the grants to pay for the publication process, with all publications being available free of charge.) If Six Flags amusement park takes advantage of their local-monopoly by charging $3 for a Coke on a hot day, this is an inefficient situation but it isn't appalling. A bit of perspective!

On the other hand, if the university was charging the students $10/hour to access journals they needed to read to graduate, that might indeed be appalling. But, as I originally emphasized, students don't have it that bad!

Ok, I see your point. Still, I can't help but feel like your original counterargument (and the position of the journals) is similar to the argument that getting hit in the head every day with a spoon is better than getting hit every day with a club. It's a tactic used by the copyright industry, for example. They'll say, "Don't like being sued for $1.92mil? How about we shut off your Internet access instead?" Internet disconnection seems a lot less bad than being sued into oblivion, but it's not the only other option (e.g. copyright owners could leave TV shows on Hulu and Netflix instead of teasing with one season, then taking them down).

So to sum up, I'm just trying to avoid and counteract the use of some rhetorical techniques I find off-putting, such as

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Door-in-the-f...

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/False_dilemma

Reply on news.ycombinator.com