141–150 of 327 posts
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I also think code used to produce results should be published as well.
I agree with this in theory... but do you really want my garbage, ad hoc, messy code that I used to pipe output from one program to another?
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$1000 for what? The research and paper writing was already funded by the tax payer. Peer review is done for free by other researchers today. Journals provide very little value for the money they extort for paper access.
FTA: >But that financial model requires authors to pay a processing charge that can run anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 per article so the publisher can recoup its costs. Edit: also, I don't expect margins of 30% from companies producing very low value. Do you really think that if they'd lower their margin to 0, with prices of around 30% less, everyone would stop complaining?
What follows is just my very uninformed opinion. I'm not a scientist myself, but my interest in CS and math has made me an avid reader of scientific papers and books - whenever they're publicly available, that is. What publishing houses do is exploit the rules of the social games that scientists themselves willingly play. When the importance of an academic work is judged by the names of its authors, or by the name of…
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It's about the same as everyone else: about 15 USD per paper, e.g. https://dl.acm.org/purchase.cfm?id=2756548&CFID=761526954&CF... They also have a somewhat restrictive licensing on their software: http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/softwarecrnotice This part is kind of weird, as they have a noncommercial clause on their copyrighted algorithms, which makes them non-free. On a slightly different note, I was some…
How the hell can that be "non-profit"? Where is the money going? Free conferences in Dubai?
https://www.acm.org/binaries/content/assets/about/annual-rep...
The finances are on pages 12 and 13. The short version: they're spending money on all the things you'd expect, but they seem to be slightly cash flow positive and have accrued around $100m in net assets.
Can someone explain me why the researchers themselves don't publish their work for free? The article says they are not paid for the articles so I don't see why they couldn't do that.
I am a professor and I was at a meeting a couple weeks ago that talked about open access publishing. There were people from many departments and there was one professor there who asking questions that made it clear he didn't know anything about online publishing (he was asking things like "where are the papers stored?" and said something about how "all this online stuff is like Big Brother")
This isn't the right question. The question is, "Who should be profiting from research papers?" The Journal performs quality control for the sake of consistency and prestige, but the papers and their reviews are put together by researchers, commonly at great cost for marginal personal gain. The article's hero doesn't really care. She needs to read papers, and needs other people to be able to read them, so she built s…
I am not sure that the way you put it s right either.
Because "who should be profiting from research papers?" is too generic of a question, and does not appear to necessarily supersede the question 'should tax-funded publication be readable for free?'
If I may rephrase your question to be: "Quality control of a research paper, must be, necessarily funded (either by money or a form of barter). Therefore question a) who should fund it, question b) who should receive funding to do the quality control"
Then, obviously, this is an important question. And I do not believe has been clearly answered either in polices or on this forum.
My answer to ( a ) would be -- the same entity that funds the research (therefore in this case the tax payers)
My answer to ( b ) would be -- a licensed or otherwise professionally certified group, independently selected (that is not selected by the researcher that authors the publication).
It is incredibly obvious that journal content shouldn't cost as much as it does.
- Scholars write the content for free
- Scholars do the peer-review for free
- All the legacy publishers do is take the content and paywall PDF files
Can you believe it? Paywalling. PDFs. For billions.
Of course the publishers say they create immense value by typesetting said PDFs, but as technologists, we can clearly see that this is bunk.
There's a comment in this thread that mentions the manual work involved in taking Word files and getting them into PDFs, XML, etc. While that is an issue, which you could consider a technology problem, it definitely doesn't justify the incredible cost of journal content that has been created and peer-reviewed at no cost. Keep in mind that journal prices have risen much faster than the consumer price index since the 80s (1).
The future is very clear, academics do the work as they've always done and share the content with the public at a very low cost via the internet.
PS. If you want a peek into how the publishers see the whole Sci-Hub kerfuffle, check out this post from one of their industry blogs - the comment section is a doozy: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2016/03/02/sci-hub-and-th...
1. https://cdn1.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/jtj2dzMfklULQipRZt_3xaLoFxU...
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FTA: >But that financial model requires authors to pay a processing charge that can run anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 per article so the publisher can recoup its costs. Edit: also, I don't expect margins of 30% from companies producing very low value. Do you really think that if they'd lower their margin to 0, with prices of around 30% less, everyone would stop complaining?
Please tell me what someone like Elsevier does then? Basically they have a monopoly on various prestigious journal names and extract rent from both sides. Finally, researchers are taking a stand and slowly moving towards open journals. See here: http://openaccess.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2015/05/20/elsevier-ev...
1. Their margins are extremely high, 90% range. 2. Open access journals can charge orders of magnitude less
Neither is broadly correct.
Regarding the claim that ~30% margins are excessive: do you think that if their prices went down by 30%, everybody would be happy?
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In CS, conferences (which organise peer review and pretty much all publish open-access proceedings) hardly ever charge more than something like $200 for attendance, and this also pays for the conference venue, logistics and a slush fund of financial support for student attendees. Why would the peer review and publication part cost more in other fields? It seems much more likely that PLOS simply charges the "$1000 or…
PLOS is a non-profit, and employs full-time professional editors. People forget the weird workflow in any journal that does biomedical work (including most of the PLOS family): manuscripts are submitted as Word files, then converted to XML and reformatted by a semi-automated process. There's manual labor involved to format the references and cross-references, mark up tables and figures, and proofread the HTML, PDF, a…
Can someone explain me why the researchers themselves don't publish their work for free? The article says they are not paid for the articles so I don't see why they couldn't do that.
Because researchers depend on funding which depends on publications in prestigious journals which charge fees for access. Every researcher I know would publish for free if it wouldn't ruin their career to do otherwise. They want their results disseminated as widely as possible.
Why can't the national/international associations in each field set up simple publishing operations (or pay a U. press to do it), with the same people doing peer review, and use their power to designate the presitage of each journal: 'this will be our tier 1 journal, this one a tier 2, etc.'
Whatever it costs, it would cost far less than the existing setup. I'd think the U. libraries would be happy to share some of their enormous savings to fund the operation.
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