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Comment by betterunix | Hacker News Reader

"I'd be interested in how people propose to maintain expert review, editing, and vetting of ideas without having the users and beneficiaries of that research bear at least some of the cost."

First of all, the reviewers and editors of journals often work as volunteers -- so the notion of cost here is somewhat dubious.

That being said, I see no problem with asking universities to facilitate the review and editing process, using money given by the government for that purpose, and to host publicly accessible archives of academic publications for the benefit of society. We should remove academic publishers from the picture entirely, because they contribute nothing to society anymore. Universities already use tax dollars (grant money) to pay academic publishers for journal access; why don't we cut out the middle man?

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>First of all, the reviewers and editors of journals often work as volunteers -- so the notion of cost here is somewhat dubious.

The reviewers and Editors (in the editorial sense of the word) are not the largest contributors to the costs associated with publishing an academic paper -- that's why they can be done for free (in the cases they are). When they are done for free they offer some other career-enhancing benefit.

Most of the cost relates to making the sausage, if you will. The manuscripts must be wrestled into a form that can be printed. That is boring and tedious work that you have to pay someone to do. There's the cost of the infrastructure required for these folks to do their work. Then there's the continuing cost of hosting the digital version(s) of the article.

I believe preparing an article for publication and distribution can be reduced to a fixed cost -- provided all parties involved cooperate.

It would be helpful to think about _why_ academic publishers exist in the first place before tossing them aside. Otherwise we'll just end up with the same situation we have now.

I think you give to much credit to the manufacture of academic sausage. It seems pretty clear - and supported by people close to the academic journal industry - that most of the cost is straightforward rentier capitalism just crying out for disruption.

> I think you give to much credit to the manufacture of academic sausage.

I don't understand what you mean by that. I merely point out it needs to be done and most discussions about open access publishing neglect to mention it.

The discussions we're having about open access publishing are based on the understanding that new communications technologies specifically target those parts of academic publishing that cost money - the formatting, layout, publication and distribution of articles.

That's why we're able to have a conversation about open access in the first place: the original source of scarcity has mostly evaporated, but Elsevier et al. are still collecting rentier profits from the artificial scarcity of access to a printing press.

The part of academic journals that actually creates value - i.e. the work of writers, reviewers and editors - is mostly unpaid work anyway.

Ahh. Then you are mistaken Mr. McGreal. I give no credit at all to the production of academic sausage :-)

Yes, it's cheaper to produce an archive-ready article and I think it should have moved into the category of solved problems long ago. It just hasn't.

Like you said, the industry is ripe for disruption. It has been for over a decade.

Anyway, I think we are generally on the same side.

If you haven't already read the following you should: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic...

He also makes the "rentier capitalism" analogy.

Thanks for clarifying - and thanks for sharing the Monbiot column. I hadn't seen it before.

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