191–200 of 327 posts
Full disclosure: I'm a founder of a company called Scholastica that provides software that helps journals peer-review and publish open-access content online. One of our journal clients, Discrete Analysis, is linked to in the NYT article. 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 publish…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're not getting paid by the publisher.
No we don't get paid by the publisher but we are paid to write papers. I can be downvoted for being correct but it doesn't change anything. Researchers are paid by research institution to do research for which product are papers.
Maybe completely free research papers are not the future but there should be a Spotify for research papers that is affordable for everyone. I hope that Elbakyan will reach her goal and ultimately change the whole industry.
Publishing used to cost money when it required physical printing/distrubution/storage of journals. Now all of this is basically free, but they still charge. Most theoretical physicists for example only care about "publishing" in the ArXiv (all free, open source). The traditional publishing is ridiculous.
Libraries used to get a physical copy of the papers, which would grant lifetime access to the research.
Today, they pay for subscription, and as soon as they stop paying, they lose access to everything.
I feel especially strongly that papers that result from taxpayer-funded research should be free.
From a government / national perspective should it be free world wide? If so, why should nations give away their expensive research that potentially give them an edge either military or commercially? Personally I almost never traded technology when I played civilization, let alone give it away!
"We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it. "
- And especially when public policy often demanding massive input from the taxpayer depends on it.
I think the long term answer is decentralized publishing. Publish everything you do on a university or private website and let others decide if it's good or not when they want to cite it instead of a peer review that is set in stone. I think people reading papers deciding if they want to cite you are smart enough to figure out if it's good research or not. The peer review process is overrated (and quite often suffers from insider networks). If you decentralize publishing you can also have other researchers upvote a paper to basically approve of the academic standards in the paper. I also think the static nature of papers is a problem. I'd much rather cite a specific version of the paper. I'm thinking about git and pull requests along the lines of "want to cite, fixed layout" or "new research disproves this" etc.
Full disclosure: I'm a founder of a company called Scholastica that provides software that helps journals peer-review and publish open-access content online. One of our journal clients, Discrete Analysis, is linked to in the NYT article. 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 publish…
Of course the publishers say they create immense value by typesetting said PDFs, but as technologists, we can clearly see that this is bunk. Amusingly, when I was a grad student, some friends showed me how they could use LaTeX to produce a manuscript that looked like a spitting image of a Physical Review article. That was in 1992.