I have to say, I'm a little surprised at how many people in this thread seem to be taking the side of the publishers. If not completely, at least to some extent. I look at this as being pretty cut and dried "if research is paid for by tax dollars, it should be freely available to the public." I don't even see how that's controversial.
That said, I understand the arguments that academics are sort of in a catch-22 situation since funding, tenure, etc. are based on journal publications, impact factor, etc. But I'd like to think that we can all (mostly) agree that the current system is broken, and at least start talking about what it would take to revise it.
At least some progress actually does seem to be happening organically. New open access journals based on the arXiv overlay model are starting to appear, like Discrete Analysis[1]. Hopefully over time this problem may correct itself.
To play devil's advocate for a moment, surely there are other things paid for by tax dollars where the benefit is indirect like it is in research?
No doubt. And there are all sorts of discussions one could get into about what should and shouldn't be publicly funded. As a Libertarian, I'm usually in the minority on those discussions, so let's not even go into that. My take on this is basically "if they're going to take my money and spend it, I at least want the system to be fair" (as I perceive it). And at least in my world-view, I think it's ridiculous to have to pay again just to read the research, especially now that we're in the Internet age where distribution costs are dramatically lower. If I wanted a paper journal mailed to me, sure, I'd be fine paying for that (up to a point). But as cheap as it is to create a PDF and slap it on a website, and then looking at how much journals are charging per article, it just feels like a complete abuse.
I suppose the argument that I'd like to investigate is the true purpose of tax dollars, since it's not explicitly clear to me how tax dollars are meant to be used. I think that's a distinct line of reasoning from how research papers should be shared more openly. It sounds like you'd probably agree that the issues are separate, in which case tax dollar allocation may not need to be involved in this conversation.
The national interstate system might be one of those things.
Sure, it's directly helpful to people going on long drives in their car between cities... but people could fly or train it, too.
However, the indirect benefits are that produce and other goods can be shipped via semi trucks quickly (ignoring the environmental and road quality impact they make).
So there's both direct and indirect benefits to taxpayers there.
I hate how copyright now lasts indefinitely. There are many papers from the 50's by people who are dead, and these companies are still claiming ownership over them. Copyright should last a relatively short time, and maybe be even shorter if you don't pay a fee to get it extended. Perhaps even a special exemption for scientific research.
If you could read all papers published 10 years ago for free, that would be incredible, even if it still cost $35 to read a new paper.
>1959 was another noteworthy year for science. C. P. Snow presented The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, an influential lecture about the gulf between the sciences and the humanities. The programming language COBOL was developed. Martin Gardner published the Three Prisoners Problem, a probability theory paradox, in his “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American. Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison published Searching for Interstellar Communications, a foundational work for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, in the journal Nature.
>If you follow the link from Nature above (and you do not have a subscription or institutional access), you will see that this 1959 article is behind a paywall. You can purchase it for $32. A distressing number of scientific articles from 1959 require payment or a subscription or account, including those in major journals such as Science and JAMA. And the institutional access that many top scientists enjoy is not guaranteed—even institutions such as Harvard have considered canceling their subscriptions because they could no longer afford the escalating prices of major journal subscriptions.
I wish they'd just acknowledge that Disney really, really wants to keep their IP forever, and just make a "Disney Exemption" -> if you're willing to pay all the money you would normally pay lobbyists to lobby to keep copyright perpetual, you get to keep your IP. Otherwise, you only get X number of years, period. That way we can stop artificially extending copyright terms just to make one corporation happy and ruining public domain for everyone else.
I know some people really want to make Disney play by everyone's rules, but they just have too much damn money and influence. At least they do tend to revive their old IP and not just let it sit there to rot indefinitely, like so many other companies.
At least then other IP is not negatively affected. Now it's just Disney trying to save Disney money, whereas the rest of the IP properly goes into public domain.
Maybe your pragmatic approach is right but I don't think I could settle for "we'll do this for this company because our politicians are easily bought". The real solution seems to be to get politicians with better ethics or create laws that force them to comply with good morals ... then of course you need a strong judiciary.
Ah yes, the "if only we voted in the right politicians". My Dad likes to make this argument till he's blue in the face, and those people never get elected (and it's a different set of people for every individual, I bet you'd disagree with most of his choices).
Of course it would fix things if all the right people got elected. But this is the real world, and that reality almost never, ever happens. It's much easier to get specific protections passed, especially ones that benefit one or more corporations, than it is to make sure "no one gets elected whose vote can be bought and believes in things different from me!"
The main reason I don't hold out much hope for my solution either is because most corporations don't believe they'd have much to gain from limited copyright, focusing too much on what they'd lose, rather than what they'd gain, from being able to use so many newer IP without paying licensing fees.
>It's much easier to get specific protections passed, especially ones that benefit one or more corporations, than it is to make sure "no one gets elected whose vote can be bought and believes in things different from me!" //
It's a very good thing when people get elected who have different beliefs to me as I'm not always right.
Also, a politician who sides with me because of a "bribe" is not a good thing IMO; it rather suggests that I'm on the side that can't win through fair play, or indeed that I'm on the side that favours those corrupt enough to pervert democracy in their favour because of their wealth.
I don't think there's any evidence to show that a copyright term less than life will damage artists, nor reduce impetus to create works. Indeed works entering the public domain appear to stimulate creative work.
I don't agree with your "too rich to legislate against the preference of" arguments for Disney. Indeed their wealth suggests strongly that the balance between public protected monopoly and free use of works has been lost.
Like in programming, there are upsides and downsides too!
While you spend your time rewriting your code in Rust, your competitor launches with a hackier version and your market opportunity is gone. Or maybe you don't rewrite it, and you end up with a buggy platform that's difficult to scale, while your competitor with a rock solid alternative starts to win your customers.
Pragmatism is always advised, but there is a cost and benefit trade off between pragmatism and idealism.
Although copyright technically is limited in term [1], it is practically forever, as in I will never see a work created today go into the public domain. Next time a bill is introduced to extend copyright term, I think the community should speak out against it.
I'm helping a startup in the grassroots lobbying space to improve how citizens can effect change. Turns out elected officials really do care a lot about their constituents, more so on average than lobbyists. Unfortunately it's hard to get the contact information for the staffers of these elected officials and it's hard to know if the supporters of a cause live in the right district that the elected representative represents.
Anyway, the platform makes this all easy and is going live this summer. If anyone does represent a special interest and wants to help beta test for free email hn (at) strapr (dot) com
I think the most important point was brushed over in the article--that journals offer prestige. Scientists are entirely aware of the problems, yet they still volunteer to submit their work to them, because they significantly improve the chances of promotion and tenure. These things are already tremendously competitive, so most would rather not volunteer for a handicap by publishing in other venues.
If it's truly misaligned incentives [ie universities are more likely to promote researchers who publish in "top" journals], then it seems like a high-powered university needs to change their criteria for promotion. Instead of requiring publication in top journals for promo, look at other metrics for quality [I imagine this differs some from one field to another].
Imagine if every conference charged speakers for speaking, and in order to get promoted you had to speak at those conferences. It's the same thing. Except most software engineers are happy not paying to speak at conferences because their promo doesn't require it.
You get promotions and tenure for doing successful grant work that brings in money to the University. You get the best grants by publishing in Science and Nature. The government (main source of grants) shares the blame here.
Working under the direction of a grant agency. I know, I worked at two such institutes that managed $10m/yr grant money for planetary and biological science. In this case (NASA) the selection was done based on recommendations from a peer committee, but under directions from civil servants who had the final say, and there was a definite culture of favoritism for the prestigious closed journals. It was good for the institute too -- Science and Nature publications and associated PR raised our image in the eyes of our managers at HQ in Washington.
Its not just the universities. At least in my country, universities are are ranked based on what journals their faculty publishes in and this affects the distribution of grants and other vital research money.
Journals like Nature and Science are usually considered the top (at least for physics, which I studied). Getting even one article published in these is a big deal. As a grad student you've got it made for when you apply for a post doc.
The irony is that most (probably all) of the researchers would gladly want their articles shared widely, and I couldn't see any researcher in favour of restricting access to an interested party wanting to see their work.
That said, if you're not in academia, you may have good luck emailing professors directly asking if they can share a copy of their paper. I've been out of school for several years now, but professors sometimes even included such PDFs on their webpages for general public consumption. Not sure if that violates any terms of the publishing journal though.
Nature (and the vast majory of journals) is OK with posting on arxiv the pre-review manuscript, but not the post-review (ie, with the changes made after the comments by the reviewers) and not the version they edited (and added their page layout).
Some journals allow us to post the post-review paper (at any rate, the changes are usually mostly cosmetic).
One thing to watch in this space: Thomson Reuters created the Impact Factor, which is a mechanism for ranking journals based on the citation count of a journal's published papers. This is the de facto way academics are judged and compared. The cynical view of a tenure application is that it basically boils down to adding up points for how many high-IF journals you've published in.
They are now selling the IP division that owns the Impact Factor. No news just yet (as far as I am aware) on who will end up buying it, but depending on who it is I could potentially see some backlash (finally) within academia if there's an unavoidable conflict of interest (ie if Elsevier buys it). That said, inertia is stronger than anyone wants to admit in academia, so I wouldn't be surprised if IF stays the dominant force in academic reputation for a long time to come. But maybe, just maybe, the time is right for the fall of Impact Factor.
One thing that can be done here without saying, "all government research must be free" would be to explicitly put funding priority on labs that have a history of publishing in open access journals, or prioritize grants where the author commits ahead of time that they will publish in open access journals.
A big part of success in modern scientific research is ability to secure funding, so if you put your thumbs on the scales enough, it could catalyze a move to open access journals as the "prestigious journals."
Exactly. The open access problem is very tied to the « publish or perish » one. Interestingly, the biggest publishers are the ones who lobby in favor of bibliometrics, and even sell off-the-shelf bibliometrics solutions (e.g., SciVal by Elsevier).
One of the major problem is that bibliometrics criteria are necessarily impacted by inertia of prestige, and publishers own the title of the most prestigious journals.
Older, tenured scientists could just go and stop publishing in those journals to build up the prestige of new (really) open access ones, but the fact is that most often they co-authors papers with their students or at least younger, un-tenured scientists, and they understandably don't want to sacrifice the careers of the new generation.
Some funding agencies now requires that work they fund are made open access, but sadly, publishers lobby in the US and in Bruxelles weight a lot in favor of "authors pay" model, and many funding agencies includes publishing budget in research grant for this reason. That is very frustrating because people mix up real open access with open access paid by authors, while 1- other economical models are possible (see my other comments on this page), and 2- countries and funding agencies could legally enforce that every papers published in a non-open access journal must be made available immediately in an open repository such as arXiv, overruling the decision of publishers who often put an embargo of e.g. 2 years before this can be done.
In H2020 projects (EU projects), the maximum embargo that can be "tolerated" is 6 months (then it has to be on arxiv) [12 months for social sciences]. However, all journals are OK with an arxiv post of the submitted (pre-review) manuscript, and this is what every authors should do.
Unfortunately, the preprint loophole doesn't really help all that much (depending on the publisher).
A few stipulations come along with publishing preprints -- for example, IEEE makes you take down the preprint and add a copyright notice to it after your paper has been accepted.
Grant giving institutions could adopt something like NIH's NIH Public Access Policy[1], which requires articles to be available to the public within 12 months of publication. It isn't perfect, but it is a step in the right direction. It essentially causes everyone in that field at once to switch over to the new system, so that research don't need to stick their career on the line to make a statement about publishing.
The counter argument to this is you pay to use national parks even though you already pay for it. A lot of people don't even go to the parks now. Making them free will mean more tax money from people who don't go to them.
How many people read this research? 1% of America? If it is free then tax payers will have to pay more to make sure it is available. 99% percent will pay to provide things they will never read.
To be clear I think it should be free but want to at least provide some counter point (even if it is paper thin...)
The counter argument to this is you pay to use national parks even though you already pay for it.
This analogy is completely wrong. The money you pay in admission to the parks go towards the parks in order to maintain and improve the parks, even though you already do that with your taxes.
The money you pay to scientific publications goes to the publisher alone, it does not, in any case, end up financing science.
That is not true, because it is possible to get rid of the publishers entirely.
The only thing that would be needed are people in charge of formatting and such, because some fields do not use LaTeX yet (this need concerns mostly biology, chemistry, and medicine). But that could be easily covered by small local businesses for a teeny tiny fraction of the costs of current subscriptions.
The other thing that costs money already exists: archives that take care of making papers available and preserve them for the future. These services would need to be reinforced but that cost is also ridiculous compared to what is currently spent as subscription (the operational cost of arXiv for example are only a bit more than what a mid sized university pays for Elsevier subscription alone…).
The large open access journals that don't have independent funding charge rates within the same order of magnitude. What evidence do you have that an order of magnitude reduction is actually possible at scale? How do you explain the expenses of both traditional publishers and open access ones, and how would you eliminate them?
First, APCs have not been calculated with regard to the costs of publishing, but rather with the goal of maintaining the same level of profits for publishers' shareholders.
Second, I know what I said is possible because some journals already do it, and there is no scale issues at all here. Journal management is entirely decentralized. One journal = one editorial board.
Let me illustrate this with one of the possible models which is called "overlay journals".
In an overlay journal, papers are uploaded for example to arXiv, and submitted for review by giving the link to the paper on arXiv. Then the editorial board (composed of researchers) does its job as it would in a traditional journal: it sends the papers to review to other researchers of the relevant field (well, at least they try). The reviewers also do their job as they would in traditional publishing. And papers are accepted as is, with modifications, or rejected, again, as usual.
Now what constitutes an issue of the journal is a list of links to the accepted versions (repositories such as arXiv can keep track of the successive versions of a paper) of the paper in arXiv.
There, same level of scientific requirements, no publishers, literaly no costs for anyone except arXiv (which is already paid for by public institutions), and researchers time, that is already spent and not paid for in the traditional system.
If you really want double-blind peer reviews you can use one of the open journal systems free software or as people currently do, public services such as easychair or scienceconf to organize the reviewing phase.
The only thing that is still necessary for some fields, as I already said, is the proper layout work. The ideal situation is that each university or group of university hires a few professional in charge of this work and who can do it in close contact with the authors of the paper. A few salaries costs less than the millions currently spend each year by each university for journal subscriptions, and the job would be done better than it currently is by publishers who often outsource it to low-salary regions of the world to increase their profits.
> How do you explain the expenses of both traditional publishers and open access ones, and how would you eliminate them?
By not granting any copyright to publicly funded work. That doesn't actually prohibit a publisher from charging readers for access, but it would require them to charge the market price for publication of digital works out of copyright. Then we see if competition can significantly drive down costs.
The result would be that publishers charge for publication, similar to current open access options. It could be that greater usage of open access would bring down the cost, but I'm not sure.
Definitely the number of grants would go down as the cost of publishing starts being factored in, although this may be partly or fully outweighed by the reduction in universities' costs.
> Definitely the number of grants would go down as the cost of publishing starts being factored in, although this may be partly or fully outweighed by the reduction in universities' costs.
Universities are paying essentially all of the cost one way or another now, how could it not be fully outweighed? It would be more than fully outweighed because the universities would no longer have to pay the publishers the amount that constitutes the monopoly rent from the copyright.
Meanwhile the public gets free access to the research which increases its utility.
1. It's different universities, including ones that don't directly fund research, and so more money in their pocket won't directly lead to more science funding. Also libraries.
2. There are many places to put extra money in a university (add to endowment, expand, etc).
>It would be more than fully outweighed because the universities would no longer have to pay the publishers the amount that constitutes the monopoly rent from the copyright.
Why do you think profit margins would go down? The "rent", to the extent a 30% margin is rent, is from the need to publish in prestigious journals. Copyright just affects how that rent is collected, but it's not clear to me how that would reduce the rent. (It may go down because people become more hesitant to publish due to the increased cost which forces them to lower their price to get more papers. But that wouldn't be such a good thing.)
arXiv charges neither for reading nor for publication. And for-profit publishers have to be profitable to exist, which necessarily incurs costs on authors and readers.
Arxiv is not peer reviewed. If you think we should get rid of that, make that argument; but keeping the review model and getting rid of access fees would increase costs elsewhere.
Regarding profit: sure, you could set up a nonprofit to do the same job. You'll end up reducing costs by 20-40%, even assuming you don't have higher costs because of lower scale/lack of experience/etc.
For other essentials like food, I've seen stories about nonprofits that get large groups together and buy in bulk. Co-ops are basically the same idea. Using a non profit to reduce costs has been done.
But we don't even need the publishers at all! There are already free venues for publishing documents!
It's also not even obvious that (anonymous pre-publication) peer review is better than just publishing everything and letting anyone and everyone comment on it just like anything else shared publicly on the web. I mean, for just one example, it's a big deal that researchers don't already publish everything!
If we don't need them, why are they still being used?
You may think peer review is over-rated. The response should be to convince others of that and get them to stop using it, not complain about the high cost of peer review/journals/etc.
The peer review process is entirely independent from publishers and can (and do!) exist without them.
> not complain about the high cost of peer review
Peer review is not paid for by publishers. It is organized by researchers who are part of editorial boards of journals or of program committees of conferences. And it is done voluntarily by researchers as part of their normal work / duties to their scientific community.
> If we don't need them, why are they still being used?
They are "still being used" mainly by researchers and grant agencies. But this is only a fraction of the number of people who care to read the results of the research work.
Researchers think of their research first, public access second. They think they need to publish with the incumbents to secure their future research. This is because the incumbents own the most respected journal names and have them in tight grip. For most researchers, there is currently no easy alternative way to get credit for their work.
But there are alternatives, it just isn't as easy and convenient for researchers to explore and start using them. The reason most of the people oppose current publishers such as Elsevier is not that researchers do not need them, but it is that society does not need them. It is because business has injected itself in a place where it prevents rather than enables society to benefit from the research.
> If anything, it's 1% of the world. The problem is not limited to the US.
Probably it's not worth making this point, but I think that would almost certainly be a bigger, not smaller fraction of Americans, since I think Americans are more, not less, likely to read scientific research than the rest of the world.
If $2b of costs is almost no expenses, then surely $1b of profit is as well. You can't have it both ways, downplaying their costs and complaining about their profit.
Well, the $2bn of "publishing costs" include paying their CEO tens of millions a year[1], paying million-dollar packages to a number of other managers including Nick Luff and David Palmer, and dropping 1-2 million a year on non-executive board members who don't do anything at all.
Besides, do you really think it takes 28,000 people to publish a single company's journals, given that the selection and review process is all being done for them on a pro-bono basis? There are massive efficiencies there - but the CEO of a 100-person non-profit couldn't justify a $30 million package, so there is absolutely no incentive for change.
If you can do it for less, go ahead. The fact that multiple companies all have similar margins, and even open access (besides for the privately funded/subsidized ones) has the same order of magnitude charges makes me think it's unlikely.
Actually, chemistry and physics do quite well with nonprofit publishers. Compare the profit margins of for-profit publishers with non-profit ones like the American Chemical Society. In 2015, the ACS made a $10m profit on $500m gross revenue, a much smaller profit margin.
So yes, it is possible to have high quality publications produced on much smaller margins. The question is whether it is possible to provide similar services for similar margins in a for-profit context. Given that for-profit companies, by definition, seek to extract the highest possible profits on what they do, one should really question whether it makes any sense for for-profit publishers to have the stranglehold they have on academic intellectual property.
Why does the logic of "taxpayer funded research should be free" suddenly change when the publisher is a non profit? If that logic is valid, why is the $500 million fine?
I should probably have said "similar charges" as I said later. Reducing the margins to nothing can at best reduce the cost by 30% or so, which I doubt would satisfy most open access advocates; given that, the real concern has nothing to do with publishers' profit.
I think there's a difference. Going to a National Park requires additional resources above just having a National Park. People to assist you, additional infrastructure like bathrooms and campsites, etc. So I think it makes sense you pay extra to actually use the park and tax payers are paying just enough to keep the park established.
However, what's the extra cost in distributing the journal article? Hosting fees? A simple website where the paper author uploads a PDF? It seems like those costs are pretty small
I certainly don't have a problem with the users of a service paying something to use that service, in order to save the rest of us a bit of money. That is how the postal system and a lot of public transport works (and, as you say, National Parks).
What's actually ludicrous is that you pay private, profit making companies to allow you to read taxpayer-funded research.
Moreover, taxpayer-funded bodies have to pay these companies to allow them to read taxpayer-funded research from other taxpayer-funded bodies. That is the epitome of private sector wastefulness spreading its tentacles into the public sector.
What do you mean? Of course publishing is a service. At what point did I claim otherwise?
The point is that taxes pay for people produce the content, and to allow people to read the content. If the publication of the content were also a public service, then no-one would be syphoning off profit in the middle. All of the money taken by that service from the consumers would be rolled back into saving taxpayer money at some stage in the process.
So your problem is with for profit businesses being involved at any stage in the process?
Suppose a park contracts with a company to provide food, and that company makes a profit; is that bad?
We could also consider workers "making a profit" from their labor, and decree that government workers must make only as much money as the minimum to feed themselves; any more would be "syphoning off profit".
I just don't see how you can make a principled distinction that says publishing margins of 30% are bad, but allows for subcontracting to private companies.
It's not about principles, it's about efficiency. 30% (if that is the number) is a huge markup. That's a lot of money that could be being spent on research and is instead mostly going to the shareholders of five publishing companies[0] . A few years ago, Harvard was spending about $3.5m on journal subscriptions[1]. That's about a million from one (admittedly big-budget) university alone, enough to cover the financial support payments of nearly three PhD students.
Part of the core business of universities is the production of research artefacts. Why shouldn't that core business also include making those artefacts available to others? Why not a subsidiary owned by a consortium of universities? Why not an organisation like EPSRC or AHRC, or even a national pan-discipline service provider?
Profit is what's left after the expenses have been taken care of. Salaries are an expense. Workers earning a salary are not making a profit, they are being remunerated for their labour.
Subcontracting to private companies is a good thing when your need for their services is subject to surge, or when your need for their services is so low that the overheads of DIY are prohibitive (Don't set up a whole in-house printing and binding facility just to do your glossy annual report, don't hire a full-time cleaner to keep your 5-desk office clean). If you are paying another company to provide a full-time, predictable service that is strongly aligned with your core business, then that is wasteful.
>It's not about principles, it's about efficiency. 30% (if that is the number) is a huge markup.
Then solve that by creating a new non profit that charges costs, or remove barriers to entering the business, and so on.
Complaining about the profit margins of a business while ignoring the reasons their profit margins are high (it's almost always because of barriers to entry) isn't useful.
>Why shouldn't that core business also include making those artefacts available to others? Why not a subsidiary owned by a consortium of universities?
That's a good idea, and I'd be all for it if they can do it. But while there isn't such a thing, complaining about high profits by companies providing a service is pointless, except to the extent you have an alternative or are pushing for one to be implemented.
> If it is free then tax payers will have to pay more to make sure it is available.
That's necessarily true. It's true that universities pay for journal subscriptions, but I guess a significant portion (or even all) of that expense is covered by the overheads universities charge grants. Given that a significant number of grants are taxpayer-paid, it's likely that tax payers are already paying for the journal subscriptions. So making them open access will shift the costs around, but it isn't immediately obvious that it will cost the taxpayers more than it currently does.
It's also a much greater undertaking for any individual person to purchase one of those subscriptions, I don't think I've ever heard of a single person doing so where they didn't have some portion of it covered by an employer where the field is relevant, or a university.
Anyone have any rough numbers on what this would cost Joe Schmo to buy?
> Anyone have any rough numbers on what this would cost Joe Schmo to buy?
There's a huge variety. An individual subscription to Nature is $200/year[0], but they often charge $30 for electronic access to individual articles.
An institutional subscription to the Astrophysical Journal is $2000/year[1], though if you're a member of a professional society, you can buy an individual, electronic subscription for $25[e.g., 2]. As a point of comparison within astronomy, a similarly prestigious journal, the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society institutional subscription is $9400/year[in the csv link in 3].
> "The counter argument to this is you pay to use national parks even though you already pay for it."
You would have a case if the publishers did not make huge profits from the research and contribute nothing back to the research. When you pay for access to a park, you know that money is going towards the running and improvement of the park.
They could publish online for much lower cost, under a CC licence.
Current profits are extortionate, to say nothing about the bullying tactics employed by Elsevier, who abuse a monopoly and force libraries and other institutions to take a lot of publications they do not want to access those they do want.
> Someone paid by the publisher needs to look at every paper.
Is that true? If so, what is the use of that? I don't see any scientific added value. I never even noticed such an activity myself. We can get rid of it where it still exists.
> Some journals calculate internal costs of up to $40,000 per paper
$40k per paper ? Haha sorry but I just don't buy that.
I'm not asserting these expenses don't exist. However (see my other comments in this thread), I'm showing that you can avoid them, and how the same quality control of publication can be obtained without having publishers around. And in the example I took close to everything is done in the traditional way. Which in turns is a demonstration that publishers added-value is minimal.
Again you are not right about that. In practice in the vast majority of the cases¹ the editorial board (for journals) or the program committee (for conferences) do that. And these people are researchers, and they're not paid by the publishers. At this stage the publisher does not intervene.
¹ In some other cases such as with Nature, what you said is true. But the point is that the model you are describing is far from being the only one, and there is no evidences that it is better. In computer science for example, the most prestigious venues are conferences not journals, and in that cases the publishers does nothing until the very end of the process, where its work often consists in putting PDFs online and that's it.
I do not have precise numbers, but I've worked on these issues with biologists, philosophers, physicists, computer scientists, mathematicians, and people in cognitive science, and also with librarians and people in charge of negotiating with publishers. What I told matches with what all these people also see from their point of view.
It's not necessarily about reading articles. It's about giving everyone the freedom and opportunity to do so if they wish. You might not want to read them now, but what if you became interested in physics, or a friend of family member became ill? You'd want to know more about these things from the research literature, and the current system denies the vast majority of people that opportunity. You don't even know if articles are any good or useful until you've paid. We recently published a paper that attempts to convey different needs for open access to research here: http://f1000research.com/articles/5-632/v1
Weird argument. If 1% of America is reading this research, then it is most likely because the research is locked behind paywalls where only those going to Universities can get access to the material.
Of course, this whole argument implies that all the research produced is only being viewed by 1% of the population then much of it is worthless and never used, therefore the public funds put into using the research were largely wasted - which we know is definitely not true. And if only 1% of the population is viewing the material, then it seems a bit unlikely that it would be so highly profitable for people like Elsevier.
I mean, this argument breaks down even further because if even only 1% more people were to use the research because it was free, the benefit to society would be worth many orders of magnitude more than the funds that would have been gained from selling the material.
The final, fatal flaw in the argument, however is that the money paid into National Parks is given to the Government, who use it to pay for the upkeep of National Parks. The people who are charging to access research are doing so to make a profit and relying largely on research funded not by the publishers, but by the U.S. Government who give grants! They are hardly contributing their entire profits into research.
>How many people read this research? 1% of America?
I disagree with this.You need to realise these numbers are because it is behind a fortified wall.There have been several times i've ended up on Elsevier/IEEE and could not read things because of the registration involved.Now i dont even bother looking at those urls(except if I am interested enough to go via SciHub). And I am quite sure there are several others like me too.
People like to read articles,and I would prefer reading the actual paper than 10 other news articles describing the new technology too.
Access to Information determines the number of people who access it.The numbers might be lesser earlier,but I assure you the growth would be exponential.
Its just painful to see how delayed/selective interactions are in the "scientific papers world" when it would be possible for massive interaction which could lead to an "Academic Boom"(horrible pun but you should get the point).
The 1% that actually read stuff, are usually under some sort of group journal usage license like a university library, or large organization site license, so they usually aren't paying anyway. I think the biggest hurdle is that these decisions are usually only made (with the exception of the occasional individual $15 ieee article purchase ) by top level executives at the journal's and the "customer's" organizations, while the costs burden is pushed on to every one else at that organization.
My fellow researchers firmly follow the, "citizens paid for it, we are gonna share it" mentality so all results and source material is made available for free online. if someone wants everything organized into a strict 10 page limit, they can have it, but they arent getting anything more than what everyone already has access too.
Maybe more than 1% would read the papers, if not for the paywall. The basis of your argument is likely due to simple confirmation bias. Sure, 1% read the papers, but only because 1% can read the papers. Who's to say nobody else would be interested if they could read them for free? Of course nobody will read something they know nothing about if they need to pay... But make it free, and they just might.
I think a closer argument is the textbook content that professors create. Writing a textbook is something that is often done on tenured professor's salaried time, essentially paid for by their university. And in the case of public universities that's public money just like research grant money. And yet you never hear the argument that all books academics write as part of their job as tenured professors should be free.
I'd argue that it's not having to pay that is the problem alone; instead - the way they charge you an insane amount of money per paper. I wouldn't mind paying, say $1 monthly on entrance to have my park clean. Charging $10 per entry is crazy though.
I expect there are a number of observable events or non-events that can be used to infer the use of an ad blocker. They don't necessarily work well ...
I've been presented with a "We see you're using an ad blocker ... please turn it off" message (I can't recall where, perhaps Bloomberg or the WSJ?) when I've just had a Hosts file in play.
I agree that publicly funded research should be publicly available, and that for-profit publishers have an entrenched commercial interest that feeds on free access to research.
But it's worth keeping in mind that the value of public funding for research is primarily for the participants, not for the output to the public. Public research funding is an education model that occasionally has the nice byproduct of useful results. I got a Master's degree on public funding, I've published papers in prominent journals in my field, and I'm pretty sure nobody would read my papers if they had them for free. The real value of the public dollars spent on me was my education.
I'm not saying research shouldn't be publicly available. It should. I am saying there are other ways we're getting our money's worth out of research funding.
A print publication with a distribution channel has been historically important. Universities don't want to be in the business of printing & distributing. Many journals also put on conferences. The need for print & distribution is the reason publishers got entrenched, but it's changing as the importance of print declines.
I do wonder if the real crime by publishers isn't locking research away from the public, but charging universities for journals, effectively using public dollars to buy the research that was publicly funded.
* edited. removed points I regret & speculate were being downvoted.
It's not about who would read your work, but who can. I don't read much the FBI/NSA/rest of government produces but I'm pretty frustrated every time the suggestion of exempting troves of content from the FOIA comes up.
I also know that my access guarantees other researches access to the same content, meaning the research that they do, that may one day benefit me down the road, has had free access to all of the knowledge available to make the best play at their own research.
It's scary to me that scientific knowledge can be locked away. I am the kind of person that believes all pharmaceutical research should be freely published and publicly available as well. Patents provide all the monopoly protections necessary, and sunlight helps disinfect bogus science that sometimes leads to death in the pursuit of profits.
I agree with you, and I have the very same concerns, but you're talking about two different kinds of can. Government info that is FOIA exempt is not available for purchase.
You can purchase most research, that is a kind of access. And if you're at a university doing research, chances are you already have access without paying personally.
The knowledge we're talking about in this thread isn't being locked away, it's being charged for. I'm with you, and I don't like it, but we can't claim there's no access.
That's not access for all. Locking information behind a paywall is limited access no matter how you spin it, whether someone can't afford to access information (individually or at scale) or said access isn't sponsored for them.
Reputation and Credential-ism, right or wrong are the pillars of Academic Science. Unless we address some of these aspects, it will provide you with copious amounts of "recreational outrage".
Fight Internet coercion -- boycott Wired. Don't link to their articles, don't visit their site, don't accept their coercive behavior. Ad blocking is not a crime, it's a right.
By this notion, I should get free tickets to all college football games. And my driver's license registration should also be free, don't my taxes already go to paying for the DMV? Wait, should anything that is even remotely funded by taxpayer dollars now be free for everyone that pays taxes?
This sort of thing happens a lot in California -- all beach land is public property, but the private land that controls access to said beach can impose arbitrary restrictions.
If say 100% of college costs were covered by a general tax base then perhaps everyone should actually get the right to a ticket/seat. If then say you're not into football then you could sell that ticket to someone who loves football. There are more nuances to figure than this, though the concept does make sense and perhaps allows for more fairness. Imagine it takes 3 years of football games to give every person in the country a seat at a game. Not all games are going to be equally in demand, and not all seats are equal, and not everyone will want to go to a football game - while others would love to go to all of them. Those are enough conditions for good supply demand market economics. The road system is a little more complex.
Why not? First tier college football is incompatible with the mission of public universities, and fees are mostly regressive taxation. You are assuming the status quo is good and right.
Not quite, because in your examples the producer and consumer are different, whereas researchers are to a large extent the main consumers of the knowledge they (as a whole) produce.
Narrowing it a bit, how about paying to read research I WROTE? I tried to access a paper of mine I didn't have handy and sure enough the fee was $35. Turned to sci-hub, of course. I pirated myself. --Anonymous, just in case
I think the article is oversimplifying the issue. This isn't about access, who reads it, or who pays for the research, it's about greed. Plain and simple. Corporations are making money off of the restricting of access to scientific research, and they are fighting to preserve that business model.
But if scientific papers were free, how could nations avoid a free-rider issue regarding other nations?
For instance, a major part of scientific research is done in US, isn't it? Does that mean that the US tax payer should be the major contributor to an hypothetical worldwide scientific activity?
Does that mean that the US tax payer should be the major contributor to an hypothetical worldwide scientific activity?
All tax payers on this planet (at least those living in a country with sizeable research spending) already contribute to the worldwide scientific knowledge. I believe this is a good thing.
> All tax payers on this planet (at least those living in a country with sizeable research spending) already contribute to the worldwide scientific knowledge. I believe this is a good thing.
Then you still get a free-rider problem, regarding all people that did not pay taxes for this research. You can ignore the issue but tax payers may not.
Do you think if you mass drop all the important physics paper and maths paper on nuclear physics in syria - then somehow ISIS will be able to create a nuclear weapon ?
It takes an intellectually advanced society to understand another intellectually advanced nation.
If science produced in the US was actually superior, demand for US scientists would sky-rocket globally.
US education would have higher value.
And other countries will try to match the US in science funding.
> Do you think if you mass drop all the important physics paper and maths paper on nuclear physics in syria - then somehow ISIS will be able to create a nuclear weapon ?
I don't know about this particular example, but I do know that some scientific works are kept secret because they do have obvious military applications. I have only one example I'm sure of, the Orion project, but I'd be surprised if there are not lots of others.
This assumes, of course, science done in other countries also becomes freely available. But why do I care who advances science, if the advances (or, at least the knowledge) are available to humans at large?
This is notwithstanding top secret scientific research, which is just loaded with nuance. But we're not discussing that today.
No, the minority pay si that can benefit, it just happens that others who haven't paid benefit too.
Like when a country act to reduce their industrial impact on the atmosphere, their citizens benefit with cleaner air/water or whatever but there's a benefit to the rest of the world too.
Being altruistic leads to greater overall benefit. Being miserly leads to global detriment.
Applying Kant's Imperative as the moral measure leads to say it's morally wrong not to pay as if no-one were to pay we all lose out.
It's not so much about altruism or the moral validity of taxation. It's about equality and fairness. If some people can take advantage from the expropriation of others, then who gets to say who can be expropriated and who can't? With taxation the justification comes more or less from the revenues and wealth differential, basically it is assumed that rich people can pay because they suffer less from the requisition of a small part of their wealth. But if the criteria is only nationality, I'm not sure they will accept it that easily.
Except of course they don't. They provide publishing services, which cost them between 60-80% of the revenue each paper bring in (based on profit margins between 20-40%). Authors sign over their copyright in exchange for this consideration. (If they didn't get anything, the copyright assignment wouldn't be valid.)
> leading journals have stepped forward to make new findings free to all.
By charging authors upfront.
>Publishers do add value, but that value doesn’t justify the cost or the lost opportunities for those who can’t (or can’t fully) access the research.
This doesn't make sense. "Groceries do add value, but that doesn't justify the cost or lost opportunities for those that can't afford food".
The solution to people not being able to access essentials is not outlawing anyone charging for it. It's subsidizing the cost for everyone to buy it, or making a government-run version that provides it for free. If you want everyone to be able to eat, you give them food stamps (or make sure they have enough money by raising the minimum wage, whatever), don't get upset at companies that provide value but also make a profit. If you can do it for less, go ahead.
Have you ever published a paper in an academic venue?
What publishers offered was delivering paper versions of articles to your local research library. Now they only host PDFs online. Apart from that their added-value work is negligible. The biggest improvement I've seen by a publisher of one of my papers was changing "Sec." to "Sect." when I was referencing section, and putting page number in blue rather than black (true story).
Anyway nowadays when a paper is accessible directly from a public repository, it is that version which will be used most often, and it includes literally zero work from the publisher.
All the real work is done by the authors, and by the reviewers, who are other researchers doing their normal job (i.e., they're not paid specifically to review papers, and more importantly not paid by publishers).
The only thing that publishers provide is reputation/prestige, and that's only because of inertia, and it's difficult to change because they own the titles of journals they publish. That's one of the numerous reasons why bibliometrics is an entirely bad idea and is counter-productive for science.
Also, not all open access journal are charging author, that is a lie installed by publishers lobbying (and this is how they actually spend money). You can research "diamond open access" or "overlay journal" for some examples of economical models where journal are high quality, open access and free to submit to.
>Also, not all open access journal are charging author, that is a lie installed by publishers lobbying (and this is how they actually spend money). You can research "diamond open access" or "overlay journal" for some examples of economical models where journal are high quality, open access and free to submit to.
Those all seem to be sponsored. That won't scale to every paper unless some large organization funds it. The biggest open access journals all charge.
> it includes literally zero work from the publisher.
As long as their expenses are >60% of revenue, I find this hard to believe. If you think they're wasteful, you can run your own and try to spend less, but denying their costs won't convince me.
>The only thing that publishers provide is reputation/prestige
Like I said, this model doesn't fit with the numbers we have about their margins. I'd at least expect over 50% profit margin if they were merely extracting rent, and probably closer to 90%.
Its hard to answer your argument directly because publishers like Elsevier never publish transparent accounting numbers. For all we know, their costs could mostly be "Hollywood Accounting". (not to mention, the profit they do report is already through the roof).
It all does strike me as obviously inefficient though. In my day to day research as a grad student I almost never benefit from work the publishers did. I don't even use them to download my papers because the paywalls are so annoying that I usually go directly to the author's home page (google scholar will even find these for you). Every half-decent CS researcher makes their work available on their personal website, at no cost,
In the end, what I am trying to say is that I don't trust Elsevier's reported expenses and that even if I did I think a huge chunk of them would be something that could be drastically reduced with a bit of technology.
>It all does strike obviously inefficient though. In my day to day research I almost never benefit from work the publishers did. I don't even use them to download my papers because the paywalls are so annoying that I usually go directly to the author's home page (google scholar will even find these for you). Every half-decent CS researcher makes their work available on their personal website, at no cost,
Different fields have different needs. You don't need too much trust in CS or math, because you can just evaluate the arguments and proof. But other fields require much more, and you do benefit from the work they did in only showing you certain papers and not others.
In all fields, the peer review process is performed by volunteer researches at no cost. The publisher DOES NOT evaluate arguments or ensure that the contents of the paper are correct. The only thing the publisher does is own the name of the prestigious journal.
> Why is it considered hard to get into those journals
Journals only publish so many papers in a given time. Its not just a matter of submitting a good enough paper.
Dunno why this is the case for journals but when it comes to conferences (where lots of CS research is published) there are obvious time limits regarding the number of presentations that can be accepted.
> why do people give them prestige and won't give a new startup journal prestige?
For historical reasons and perverse incentives, sadly. Young researchers cannot afford to publish on new startup journals because advancing your carrer depends on publishing in prestigeous journals (universities evaluate researchers based on the prestige of where they publish). Meanwhile, tenured professors are under less pressure when it comes to career advancement but they also need to publish on prestigeous journals to secure grant money to fund their labs and to accomodate for their younger co-authors (who are still trying to advance their carrers).
It also doesn't help when the "journal prestige categorization" is defined by the government, as happens in my country[1]. Not only are our journal ratings always outdated (punishing startup journals and conferences) but they also emphasize publishing in journals over publishing in conferences (which is terrible for CS research in particular)
Once again: the curation is not performed by the publisher, but by the editorial board and the reviewers, who are researchers, and are not paid by the publishers for this work.
Paid academic journal editors are rare exceptions.
From one of your own links:
Carol Barnes, professor of psychology and neurology at the
University of Arizona in Tucson, is a reviewing editor at
the Journal of Neuroscience, a 3-year appointment for which
*she receives no compensation*.
(…)
Barnes has received funding from the university to hire an
assistant to provide clerical support to assist her with
the manuscript review process. She considers herself
fortunate, because "without this help, I would have had to
decline this position."
Not only she was still paid by the university for whats seems to be a full time job during 3 years according to the article, but in addition to that the university, not the publisher, paid for an assistant to this job!
Exactly. I strongly believe that the majority of their expenses are related to lobbying and paying professional lawyers to scam public research librarians into signing awful contracts with them.
By the way, these contracts most often contains non-disclosure as legal requirements, which I find outrageous for public money, especially because it gives a strong advantages to publishers in negotiating these contracts.
Even if that is true I would rather see public money sponsoring real open access journals than spend paying author fees and subscription to closed access and hybrid journals.
> As long as their expenses are >60% of revenue,
What I truly question is the nature of these expenses. From my point of view inside academia in the field of computer science, and knowing a lot of people in other fields of academia, the actual work put by publishers in the final product that is a published scientific paper is close to zero (except for those fields where there is layout work because they do not use readymade LaTeX documentclasses).
>Even if that is true I would rather see public money sponsoring real open access journals than spend paying author fees and subscription to closed access and hybrid journals.
That's a legitimate argument. Shifting around who pays what may very well result in positive externalities. But merely complaining about publisher profits while ignoring their costs doesn't work.
It's the researcher who produced and typeset the article; the publisher does nothing more than hosting PDFs sent directly from the authors after they passed peer review, which is not something the publisher is involved with.
That said, I understand the arguments that academics are sort of in a catch-22 situation since funding, tenure, etc. are based on journal publications, impact factor, etc. But I'd like to think that we can all (mostly) agree that the current system is broken, and at least start talking about what it would take to revise it.
At least some progress actually does seem to be happening organically. New open access journals based on the arXiv overlay model are starting to appear, like Discrete Analysis[1]. Hopefully over time this problem may correct itself.
[1]: http://discreteanalysisjournal.com/articles