Royal Astronomical Society: all journals to publish as open access from 2024

It makes more sence for taxpayer to pay for publishing of research, than for each of individually to pay for accessing it.

As a general view, I am not sure on the merits of this spesific event.

But also, why are commercial entities reviweing scientific papers and deciding merit?

Are their interests aligned with mine as a tax payer?

> The point of publishing something in a journal is to have people _more_ able to read it, not less!!

There won't be anything to read if most researchers are gatekept out of publishing in the first place.

> Generally people without funding support e.g. from 'developing countries' are able to publish for free via a fee waiver, as the article suggests.

Money issue is an issue in a lot of countries, not just developing ones. In France research budget are slimmer every year and it's not unusual for researchers to pay things like travel to conferences from their own pocket. Even when the institution is paying, it's often only refunding months after the fact, so researchers have to pay in advance and god forbid they ever lost a paper or else they won't see their money back.

And then there is the case I mentioned in other comments like myself who are out the academic system (or tries to enter it but have no support yet) but still having papers they want to publish. I don't want to shell out half or a full month of salary to publish a PDF that will be read by a dozen of person worldwide.

RAS used to have all articles available to everyone for free after 1 year (immediately if one wanted to pay for open access). I thought this was a reasonable compromise. The new policy will damage early career researchers and groups at less established institutions that will not be able to publish their own research. I have published a number of papers on MNRAS, but now I will move to other journals. In principle, I can charge the publication costs to my NSF grant, in practice that means I would not be able to send my students to conferences, because research support funding is very stretched (no more than few thousand dollars per year per student). This would damage their career prospects. Theory grants are already very small and adding several thousand dollars extra to the budget can make the difference between the grant being awarded or rejected (it should not be, but this is how it works). Moreover, even at R1 institutions, a lot of theory research is actually not funded by federal grants.

Journals were created to support the scientific community and provide a platform for scientists to discuss. Charging exorbitant publication fees damages the very mission of these journals.

While for other fields Gold Open Access may be a good thing, in astronomy it is worse than the status quo. Most papers were on arxiv, so people could read for free anyway. I've already seen comments saying we should switch to PASA which is has no page charges (unless you want to do the Gold Open Access thing) https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/publications-of-the-...

The right thing to do would be to switch to OJAp (see https://telescoper.wordpress.com/), and have the institution funds go to arxiv and such overlay journals.

* I absolutely agree that publicly funded research should not be behind paywalls, but right now with MNRAS it is not. Pretty much everyone puts paper on arxiv and people in the UK had to deposit papers into university repositories anyway where it is available for free. (This may not apply in all fields, but it is certainly true in astronomy)

* I have just applied for a UKRI grant this week and we are not allowed to put in page charges there full stop. (I am also lucky to be in Scotland where there is a special deal with MNRAS where we don't have to pay)

* I agree waivers are good, but there are plenty of people without external funding even in 'rich' countries like UK/USA etc. It's enough to see the success rates for grants to realise that many people don't have them.

There was already free access, it's called arxiv. The value of MNRAS it was free to publish in, so no, not a win in any way.

I would point out that the Royal Astronomical Society is a charitable organisation. It should not be put in a class with Elsevier and the like. The page charges actually go to the cost of publishing rather than to shareholder profits.

What can seem like a small improvement can often delay or even prevent major overhaul of the system. It's throwing a few crumbs at the starving peasants and we scramble to pick them from the ground instead of demanding shares of the bread. There should not be private companies profiting off publicly funded research in the first place. If it's like you say and universities will be paying those fees, that's in some ways even worse. It wouldn't surprise me if the feudal copyright lords like Elsevier actually supported this. Best thing that can happen to them is getting their fees under the table and not in the open. The less students and the public understand about how it works, the better from their point of view.

> wrestle control of copyright out of the hands of Disney, Warner Brothers,

With generative AI, more content will be made on a per-year basis than all of recorded human history prior.

I don't think the kids will give a damn about Star Wars when they can make their own "Space Pirates vs Steampunk Captain Nemo 20XX: Ultimate Dad Joke Battle The Stakes Have Never Been Higher 2"

I've come to think this is actually a large problem. In the subscription model the prices were paid for longer time periods, like yearly, and publishing was free. The bills went to librarians who managed everything professionally and had a good overview. This showed clearly in the conflict between 'Project DEAL' and Elsevier the last few years, where a bunch of German Universities and Institutes started collective bargaining to get prices down, and even stopped subscribing for a while.

Now the bills go to individual researchers who often don't even publish with a specific journal more than once every couple of years. I doubt anyone will keep track how much publishing fees increase. Also it's not really the case that there is much competition, if you can get your paper into a high-ranked journal you don't send it elsewhere to save 500$ or something. Also it used to be that the library subscription budget was clearly defined to the University or institute, now the APCs often come out of one of the many research grants.

My bet is that the APCs will increase much faster than the subscription fees did.

pardon if this is ignorant but i mean now that arxiv is well established, what is the barrior to “publish papers on your own” if you dont particularly care about the journal reputation (and those that do probably dont pull this kind of scummy stunt)

I don't know for this specific publisher, but in research, usually:

- scientific editors… are researchers paid by a university

- copy editing… is done by the authors

- typesetting… is done by the authors

- reviews… are done by the other researchers paid by their respective university

Okay, the infrastructure remains. The needs are: a simple website serving PDF files and pages with the metadata. You can even let something like HAL, Arxiv or Sci-Hub do that.

Not all of them do: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_open_access which charge neither readers nor authors. In TCS, see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_Methods_in_Computer_Sc...

Hmmm. Isn't quite a lot of these publications taking in a PDF, so their cost of much of this is roughly zero? Except for the eyeballing if the header/footer overlaps anything on the page, in which case you request the author reformats their paper to respect the margins?

Yeah sure it take thousands of dollars to make a PDF. There is a bunch of small organizations and universities that manage to have journal free for reading *and* publishing. There's no reason to pay huge fees for "typesettings" in an area where most of this thing in automated. If the publishing pipeline is too complex it's time to remove bullshit and simplify things. Feeding a latex file into a pipeline or clicking on "save as PDF" in Word shouldn't cost more than a few cents.

whats the all in cost of publishing to something like Nature? couldnt find this info

They only have "a hold on research" because academia wants it that way. There's no legal obligation for any research org to publish in journals. They do it voluntarily, for reasons that have nothing to do with furthering science. And despite this, instead of demanding an end to journal dominated academic research, we just complain about the cost.

Nobody wants to deal with the big pink elephant, so instead we argue about who's gonna pick up the turd it left in the living room.

Astronomy does better than a fair few of the physics subfields at arxiv usage (optics is especially bad from what I hear).

So tell your representatives in government to stop putting government funded research into journals. (They won't stop, and the reason why is the same reason why journals have those big profits)

I don't think this is true in general. Certainly, they aren't paid by the publisher, but I'd imagine most referees are in paid employment with institutions that expect them to review the occasional manuscript as part of their job.