Doge order leads to journal cancellations by U.S. agricultural library | Hacker News Reader

Doge order leads to journal cancellations by U.S. agricultural library

science.org

48 pointsmatwood12 comments

If you were to write up the actual accounts of what's going on as a fictional tale, it would seem too fake to be convincing.

I think this because the Revolutions podcast by Mike Duncan has a season where he creates a fictional Martian revolution, and the new PHB I mean CEO ruins operations by instituting massive new policy in the name of efficiency, but ends up making everybody's jobs slower and worse, and it felt too fake to fit in with the rest of the story.

I must now reevaluate the incompetence of "efficiency" seeking C level execs. Perhaps they really are that bad.

If we're writing such a tale, surely it'd be more believable that Musk and Trump are literal Manchurian candidates - because I'm sure China (and most of BRICS) is just loving what the US is doing to itself. Will make the inevitable "multi-nodal" world get here sooner.

I mean a more straightforward comparison would be that this is a continuation of privatization & deregulation a la Thatcherism/Reaganism or w/e.

Thatcherism on ketamine if you will

There's no incompetence involved.

If you read the story, none of the more expensive, "legacy publishing houses", like Elsevier, had their contracts cancelled.

All of the publication access to university presses and open access publishers were cancelled.

This is another power/money grab

I was really enjoying the first few episodes of the new season, but I just can't stomach the concept right now.

I'm saving them, and maybe someday I'll be able to listen.

It would be so much more efficient if they just declared that the government wasn't going to do any kind of science any more.

As it is, they're wasting tons of money by eliminating the support that people need to do their jobs.

Well maybe Ukraine will allow the US to import their grain when we can no longer grow it ourselves.

Like we allowed USSR to do in the 70s and 80s.

It’s amazing how history kind of repeats. It’s crazy how the dark ages happened and how they can happen again.

- Government uses tax payer money to fund a bunch of research (internal and at universities)

- Some publisher paywalls the research

- Taxpayers pay publisher to unpaywall the research

Really dumb system. All research should be open, the CS field is doing this well. All sciences should follow.

all taxpayer funded research should be open sourced.

It is, both at the USDA [0] and those who receive grants from NIH and NCI.

All this action does is make researchers at USDA much less productive by removing their access to research that others have published behind paywalls. However, Elsevier, the most vampiric of the paywallers, was deemed suitable-to-be-paid by DOGE.

[0] https://www.nal.usda.gov/services/public-access

This DOGE action makes that system far far worse:

> Most of the affected publishers are university or nonprofit scientific society presses, including Cambridge University Press; Oxford University Press; the American Phytopathological Society; the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which publishes the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; and AAAS, which publishes Science. (Science’s News section is editorially independent.) Several of the journals whose subscriptions were canceled rank in the top quartile for impact factor in their subfield—for example, the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Food & Function and Oxford’s Journal of Integrated Pest Management.

> The National Agricultural Library cuts didn’t include journals at Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley. Together those publishers accounted for more than half of the library’s journal subscriptions before the cuts, according to an analysis by Science. Studies of journal subscription fees indicate that on average, scientific society publishers charge less than such for-profit companies.

Only the most greedy pay-walled publishers are getting paid now.

And on top of it all the current researchers are missing out on a lot of research.

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