Hacker News Reader

Comment by a3_nm | Hacker News Reader

It's not as good as the title says. The journal publishers will still own the copyright, they will just have to license some rights to the university.

View on HN

From the article: "academic staff will grant to The Trustees of Princeton University “a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all copyrights in his or her scholarly articles published in any medium, whether now known or later invented, provided the articles are not sold by the University for a profit, and to authorise others to do the same.”"

That means unless a waiver is given, it doesn't matter what the journal does or thinks, the university can publish the material anyway it likes. A compromise of sorts, but the effect is that more people potentially have access.

If more universities support this kind of policies, the momentum could break the current problem of priced access to results of research that are not in any way, paid by the journal publishers. As indicated by the article, peer reviewers are not paid for that, and so merely the editors are paid in due course. However, charging for the price of what an article needs, is far from what the cost could really justify itself with.

Just have a thought, do we really need journal publishers these days? It was once a time we don't have any means than print publishing to exchange views, now we have the series of tubes to do so.

The main thing the journals produce is prestige.

That, and reliability. You're assured that some kind of peer-review happened, at some point, and that some standards were met. What standards, and what kind of peer review, will differ per journal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com