Closed access means people die | Hacker News Reader

Closed access means people die

blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk

105 pointsivoflipse17 comments

Well said! The same situation exists in all subjects and the presented arguments can be extended to all of them. Perhaps lives are not always lost but time and money are, for sure. When a large chunk of research money has to be used up buying access to information, then less research gets done.

So these people who are in business of making money by restricting access to information that was altruistically provided by someone else are clearly promoting backwardness and ignorance.

I can never agree that publishing of academic papers is closed to subscription journals.

Isn't it in the best interest os science to have knowledge fully accessible by anyone?

It's just one of the cases where there are some people making a load of money out of a completely bogus business model that they manage to continue to lobby into persevering while there is no logical purpose for it to even exist.

Not fond of ridiculously-expensive journals. But you can extend any number of economic-pressure arguments to the conclusion 'X makes people die!' It sounds like alarmism and its not very convincing.

If you want Bangladesh to have access to journals/articles, start a fund to pay for it - that would be effective now. Its going to take time to change the system - you could even say "Advocating politically makes people die!"

Actually, not so much in this case. Open-access publishing is cheaper for researchers as well as readers -- much, much cheaper. The problem is only getting from here to there. There is no question than the grass really is greener on the other side, for everyone except the middle-men currently growing fat on the Proprietary Academic Publishing Tax.

I'm not convinced they perform no useful function. At the least, they curate the collection. Who will do that? For free? Reliably?

Its disingenuous to say "Lets have X for free" without examining the economics. Why not cars for free? Free movies! I'd like that, Netflix is expensive.

Free cars and free movies are not access to information though.

Almost all of the work is done by academics.

The reviewers are unpaid academics.

The editors are academics, and paid very, very little.

Essentially, all the journals do is print them (which is pointless these days) and maintain the website (which is something that could easily be done by libraries).

In fact, most universities provide open access repositories for all of the papers of their academics, so the journal websites could be reduced to a submission site, and links to the finalised papers with very little injection of money.

Joe, no-one is suggesting curation, hosting, indexing and the like should be done for free. (At least, I a not!) We are suggesting that the result of this work should be available to all -- including, crucially, the researchers who did the work and the citizens whose taxes funded it. Increasingly, we are seeing the author-pays model work well, with publication fees coming out of project grants.

That seems like a conflict of interest for the publisher. For every article filtered out, they lose money?

Or pay to submit and risk not being accepted anyway? Kind of a 'poll tax', where you have to have money to be heard. In principle its shakey either way, though if the fees were low enough...

Cambridge (where the blog is hosted) has been a staunch defender of sane academic freedom of speech for hundreds of years.

I say "sane" because Cambridge groks individual responsibility, and generally stays out of the way.

Why should researchers be forced to publish in closed-access journals? There are many of us that feel the same, and would publish openly if we could.

You're right. Making arguments like this are a way to shortcut a complex system of possible actions. It's like the old story about a computer's long boot time costing lives.

If only there were some mechanism we could use to assign value to all possible actions, content, and products. Some way of determining how much life/value each action would create and then pursuing the actions that provide the most efficient value. Seems too complex of a search space for a single authority though, and people would disagree on how many lives are saved/value.

Perhaps a crowd sourced method where everyone individually voted what was most important to them, and those votes assigned value. To avoid spam we could make people provide things of value themselves in order to benefit from the value created by others. So the higher the assigned value, the more people are trying to provide it.

(TL;DR)free market.

Congratulations - you've created a reduction from a somewhat-tractable problem to a much harder one.

The point was that we already have solved the problem of "where do we spend our time given that all options have costs"

If this were true ("solved"), it would be the prime argument for a centrally planned economy. 'Free market' isn't a solution, but a heuristic that produces a non-horrible moral outcome.

One of the reasons we discuss things symbolically is to hopefully take advantage of the structure of the problem to generate a better outcome. Your reduction of journal-access to free-market is about as useful as a reduction from addition to 3SAT.

Of course, a lot of things mean people die. Not having information is one thing. Also, for example, not having money means a country can't afford healthcare for its citizens. Should we give them all money for free healthcare? Hey, if you don't, PEOPLE WILL DIE. Can you live with that? Can you? Maybe you should give all the countries all the money they need, just in case. Because people could DIE.

I'm not against open access, but this is a bit of a silly argument. Charity is charity, and it's a good thing, but we shouldn't pretend that it is unethical _not_ to be charitable, otherwise charity loses its meaning and instead it's just.. I don't know... something else.

Again, don't misconstrue what i'm saying (I predict it will be miscontrued.) I agree with the principle that journals charge too much and that the whole academic publishing system is pretty much a racket. But the argument that DO THIS OR PEOPLE WILL DIE just makes you sound as bad as right-wing extremist political rhetoric.

well, maybe.

[paywall'ed access to information] means people die, IF the said information would still be discoverable under an open access system.

closed journals fill an important purpose in the ecosystem -- they provide friction[1] through cost, peer review and filter. it raises the bar for publication. it also means that without this aggregation and filtering mechanism, we wouldn't be able to find the important needles in the haystack, and that means people die.

go figure.

[1] seth godin on friction http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/05/friction-sav...

(i'm an engineer, i'm speculating)

Open journals can just as well be peer-reviewed and filtered as closed ones. The reviewers generally do not receive money for reviewing, so behind a paywall or not does not make a difference for the filtering mechanism.

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