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Comment by fdej | Hacker News Reader

As an author, the added value is the name of the journal. The pedigree of the journals you have published in is one of the primary qualities that grant and hiring committees look at. The whole system is obviously a scam, but you have to play the game if you want a career in science.

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This is why we have to fight for the right Open Access model.

Most publishers offer "Gold Open Access", which is "authors pay" instead of "readers pay", and of course the price is decided by the publisher…

This is not what Open Access means, and it doesn't solve the main problems.

Diamond Open Access focuses on the real problems.

1- It should be free to publish, free to read, free to reuse. The Diamond Open Access model implies free licenses such as Creative Commons BY for articles and data.

2- Rather than being owned by publishers, the journals have to be owned by their editorial board, which itself has to be a legal entity of some sort. This would avoid problems such as prestige inertia which forces researcher to publish with asshole publishers: if the scientists actually running the journal own it, they could have switched to open access and/or to a different publishers when needed.

Apart from that, we of course have to fight against bibliometrics…

And where does the money come from?

Money comes from the same place it always did: funders (usually the public purse). The difference is in the OA model the cost of publishing is included in grants, rather than through libraries and other routes.

Instead of having each university pay millions each year to subscribe to privately owned journals, we use (a part of) this money to develop and maintain the necessary infrastructures (servers, software developers, librarians, …). The rest of the money could be used for additional research.

How much money does it really take to run a web-assessable open-access journal? It could very well be funded on charity.

Open access can be mutually independent of "selective" for a journal. How readers access a journal has nothing to do with the pedigree and the quality of the articles it publishes.

Or someone starts to stand up, rejects the scam and starts a new, open access policy on a global scale. Yes, easier said than done, I know.

> you have to play the game if you want a career in science.

You may have a career, but i doubt that qualifies one as a scientist.

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