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Comment by elashri | Hacker News Reader

Just friendly remember that Open access publishing is the new business model that is more lucrative for publishing industry and it is basically a tax on research activities but paid to private entities and mostly paid by taxpayer money (part of grant money goes to that). That's because as another commenter says now authors pays high fees (thousands of dollars) in advance, while at the same time peer reviewers and sometimes even editors are not paid. And of course in neither case (open or closed access) authors get a dime.

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Authors where paid to do the research and publish their work that produced the paper (that is what the grant was for). PLoS an Open Access publisher pays editors, type sets the work, finds a reviewer and publishes the work for free access on the internet. Reviewers are the ones that generally do not get paid for their work.

Elsevier makes over $3 billion dollars with the closed publication model. They force institutions to pay for bundles of journals they do not want. The Institutions often do not supply access to the general public despite the papers being produced with public money (and despite many of the Institutions being funded by public money).

Paying the cost upfront from the grant increases the availability to the public.

I think the Elsevier model will eventually be deprecated, at the least for the open sector of society (aka taxpayers money). People demand that when they pay taxes, they should not have to pay again due to Elsevier and I think this is a reasonable demand. Many researchers also support this.

>PLoS [...]

At low costs of $2k~$3k per publication[0]. Elsevier closed-access journals will charge you $0 to publish your paper.

>Elsevier makes over $3 billion dollars with the closed publication model.

Elsevier is also[1] moving to APC for their journals because is better business.

>The Institutions often do not supply access to the general public despite the papers being produced with public money

Journals (usually) forbid you of sharing the published (supposedly edited) version of a paper. You're allowed to share the pre-published draft (see arXiv). Institutions could (and some indeed do) supply those drafts on their own.

>Paying the cost upfront from the grant increases the availability to the public.

At the expense of making research more expensive and hence more exclusive. It's money rather quality that matters now. Thus it isn't unsurprising that Frontiers & MDPI, two very known open-access proponent publishers, are also very known to publishing garbage. It's ironic that once was said that any journal asking you for money to publish your paper is predatory, yet nowadays somehow this is considered best practice.

[0]: https://plos.org/fees/ [1]: https://www.elsevier.com/open-access

Better busness or are their customers demanding it? PLoS is a Non-Profit - feel free to look up how much they make. I believe it is public record.

If researchers cannot pay the APC then PLoS often reduces the fee. Also - half of that grant money is used by the Institution as administrative overhead. An part of that overhead is paying Elsevier for journal access. If you want to decrease the cost of research that may be a better place to start.

I agree that volume often tends to result in garbage but the review is supposed to lessen that. Again that garbage did get funded some how.

I am not pushing PLoS - they are simply a publisher I am familiar with that uses this model.

One last post.

The garbage thing is really interesting. I'm going to propose another reason for garbage is Academia's reliance on publication as the primary means for giving promotions and judging peoples work. This leads to all kinds of disfunction.

Was it Nobel Prize Winner Peter Higgs that said his University wanted to fire him because he didn't publish frequently enough?

Authors may NOT be paid at all for their work, or may even pay to do it.

I am a self-funded PhD student and no one paid me for the work that went into my open access paper. As it happens in this case the journal waived the publication fee, so no one paid anyone anything except I suppose the nominal pro-rata portion of my university fees that I paid.

That is true also. The pre-pub route may be your best bet if that is a concern. One shoe does not fit all feet. I am only trying to argue the merits of the Open Access model. It is certainly not perfect.

It seems that perhaps neither are inherently 'good models'? What would an ideal alternative look like?

It is certainly not perfect. Competition/Choice is good. It is interesting that people do not understand their grant money is paying for it regardless. Either an upfront cost or through the administrative overhead the Institution gets from the grant.

non profit publisher or even better a goverment service.

Why was this comment flagged? There’s plenty of room to disagree with it, sure, but it isn’t offensive or repulsive or anything. If anything, I’d love to see it argued against…

It wasn't flagged, they're shadowbanned. [dead] without [flagged] is not the same as [flagged][dead]. [dead] alone is shadowbanned or maybe mod killed, [flagged][dead] means that it was flagged to death by users.

They (or someone) needs to message the mods about it, it looks like they've been shadowbanned since their first comment 6 months ago.

> Just friendly remember that Open access publishing is the new business model that is more lucrative for publishing industry and it is basically a tax on research activities but paid to private entities and mostly paid by taxpayer money...

While I do not disagree with this statement, this makes a significant difference for the citizens who do not happen to work in academia. Before open access, the journals would try to charge me $30-50 per article, which is ridiculous, it's a price of a textbook. Since my taxes fund public research in any case, I would prefer to be able to read the papers.

I would also love to be able to watch the talks at academic conferences, which are, to very large extent, paid by the authors, too.

Where are you getting such inexpensive textbooks???

Kidding, i agree $30-50 per article is outrageous.

Yeah was about to say the last textbook I paid for was $380 dollars and it was a custom edition where the author was also the professor.

The entire education system is a racket.

We need a taxpayer funded PDF host similar to arxiv where all taxpayer funded research gets published, and if journals want to license the content to publish themselves, they pay a fee to the official platform. It'd cost a couple hundred grand a year, take ~3 people to operate full time. You could even make it self-funding by pricing publishing rights toward costs, and any overflow each year would go back to grants, or upgrades.

It should be free and open access, no registration, no user tracking, no data collection, no social features, just a simple searchable paper host that serves as official record and access. You'd need a simple payment portal for publishing rights, but fair use and linking to the official public host would allow people to link and discuss elsewhere.

It's not a hard technical problem, it's not expensive. We do things the stupid, difficult, convoluted way, because that's where bad faith actors get to pretend they're providing something of value in return for billions of dollars.

I think the big missing thing in any proposed or actual fully open system is it does away with the difference between "prestigious" and "non-prestigious" journals. "Prestigiousness" is actually a really useful signal and it seems really difficult to recreate from the ground up in an open and fair system. It's almost like "prestige" can only emerge in a system of selfish/profit-motivated actors.

It is a kind of fuzzy signal though. Maybe a better replacement could be found. Like, if we all had PGP keys, we could just sign the article that we like, right? Then, a web-of-prestige that more accurately represents the field could be generated. ORCID could manage it, haha.

Publishing collusion rings would greatly enjoy using this web-of-prestige: https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/a-massive-fr...

Those already occur though.

I wonder if we could form a graph that would make a collusion ring intuitively visible (I’m not sure what—between papers, authors, and signings—should be the edges and the nodes, though). Making these relationships explicit should help discover this kind of stuff, right?

Another problem with my idea is that a lot of famous luminaries wouldn’t bother playing the game, or are dead already. But, all we can really do is set up a game for those who’d like to play…

Well, yes, this is exactly the kind of well-intentioned technical solution that just will not work at all when it comes in contact with human nature. "Oh boy my paper got accepted in Nature!" vs - "oh boy some people on the internet signed my pgp thing!". Just not the same.

I mean… if somebody famous in your field signed your paper, you might be excited. Reviewer #2 is just some anonymous figure.

I think the difference is with a journal like Nature people are competing for strictly limited real-estate. The famous academic could still sign however many papers they like..

Prestige, in an honest system, would be a great signal. The problem is with any sort of closed system, the signal immediately gets gamed. Therefore, the open system is the least bad of the available options. A journal could still achieve prestige by curating and selecting the best available studies and research - in the proposed system, nothing is preventing them from licensing material like any other potential platform or individual.

Profit motivated exclusivity under private control resulted in the enshittification vortex of adtech doom we're currently all drowning in. If you want prestige - top ten status in Google search results - you need to play the game they invented. Same goes for all of academia.

People stopped optimizing for good websites and utility and craft and started optimizing for keywords and technicalities and glitches in the matrix that bumped their ranking.

People stopped optimizing for beneficial novel research and started optimizing for topical grants, politically useful subjects, p hacking, and outright making shit up as long as it was valuable to the customers (grant agencies and institutions seeking particular outcomes, etc.)

Google is trash, and scientific publication is a flaming dumpster fire of reproducibility failure, fraud, politically motivated weasel wording nonsense, and profit motivated selective studies on medical topics that benefit pharma and chemical companies and the like.

Scientific publishing is free speech. As such, it shouldn't be under the thumb of institutions or platforms that gatekeep for profit or status or political utility or any of a dozen different incentives that will fatally bias and corrupt the resulting publications.

It's incredibly cheap and easy to host for free. It benefits everyone the most and harms the public the least to do it like that, and if a prestigious platform tries to push narrative bending propaganda, it can be directly and easily contradicted using the same open and public mechanisms. And if it happens in the other direction, with solid, but politically or commercially inconvenient research saying something that isn't appreciated by those with wealth or power, that research can be openly reproduced and replicated, all out in the open.

>The problem is with any sort of closed system, the signal immediately gets gamed.

I agree, but..

>Therefore, the open system is the least bad of the available options.

this does not necessarily follow.

>A journal could still achieve prestige by curating and selecting the best available studies and research

See, this is just the kind of thing that I think will just not work when organized top-down like that. "Oh, we'll just make a prestigious journal by only letting the best papers in" - everyone could say that, but what would induce the authors of the best papers to submit them to your specific journal at all in the first place? Currently it's the fact that it's already prestigious, and this reputation has grown over many years through informal social processes that are very hard to codify.

>Scientific publishing is free speech. As such, it shouldn't be under the thumb of institutions or platforms that gatekeep for profit or status or political utility or any of a dozen different incentives that will fatally bias and corrupt the resulting publications.

Of course I agree, just to be clear I am a great proponent of openly accessible science - just think the prestige thing is an interesting corner case.

It'd be flooded in seconds with millions of AI-generated articles. arXiv is already suffering from this.

Fun fact: zenodo, which is used very often to archive (academic) software artifacts, is funded by the EU (+adjacent countries) and is basically part of CERN.

this is pubmed. Most papers that are funded by NIH research are available on pubmed if the main publisher gives access to the full text (after some set embargo period...usually around a year).

> Open access publishing is the new business model that is more lucrative for publishing industry and it is basically a tax on research activities but paid to private entities and mostly paid by taxpayer money

In addition to what @tokai said, I think it's also important to keep in mind that before Open Access the journal publishers charged subscription fees. The subscription fees were paid by universities and that was also likely largely taxpayer funded (e.g., using money from overheads charged to grants).

And under that model the publishers would also do all the scummy things you're familiar with if you've been say a cable TV subscriber. For example bundling four crap things with one good thing and saying that's a 5-for-1 offer when actually it's just an excuse to increase the price of the thing you actually wanted.

This isn't the golden age we might have hoped for, but open access is actually a desirable outcome even if as usual Capitalism tries to deliver the worst possible version for the highest possible price.

"Capitalism tries to deliver the worst possible version for the highest possible price" This is brilliant. So much information packed into one sentence.

I have no idea what the normal process is but I have never been paid for any peer review I've ever done and none of those was for an open access publication.

Open access paradox. As an author, I hate gold open access journals. My supervisor doesn't have money (~3000 CAD nowadays) to pay for publishing. He says he would rather pay for my or other grad students' summer salary

Each time I spent hours searching an appropriate journal for my research. As time goes on, I feel like research is only for very wealthy people.

Open Access is not a business model for the publishers. They have build different ways of sucking fees out of authors when shifting to Open Access. But its FUD to claim that it's an issue with Open Access. OA is a question of licensing and copyright, nothing more. Muddling the publishers business practices with the movement to ensure free and open access to research literature is destructive and ultimately supporting the publishers, whom has been working hard for decades to dilute the concept.

I don't disagree that the ultimate goal is have open and free access is a noble goal. I just point our that what is happening in practice is that it is being taken as a new business model that pays on average more for the publishers. I'm not sure my comment implies I criticize the open access concept and I apologize if it is not clear.

but what prevents scientists (as both authors and reviewers) from banding together and creating journals that don't require money (freeing money for research budgets)?

I like the way that people add “a friendly reminder” like they’re just jogging your memory of a well known fact.

Publishers have been fighting OA for an incredibly long time. They are not foisting this on people because it’s a new great scheme they’ve come up with, they have been pushed to do it.

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