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“You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

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Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

#41

Post by wrong_variable »

grondilu wrote: post #38

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?

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.

Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

#42

Post by themartorana »

grondilu wrote: post #38

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?

Yes.

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.

Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

#43

Post by grondilu »

DarkLinkXXXX wrote: post #39
grondilu wrote: post #38

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?

Wouldn't that benefit everyone?

You end up in a situation where a minority is coerced to pay for everyone. It's morally wrong.

Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

#44

Post by p4bl0 »

ikeboy wrote: post #29

>Publishers acquire this research free of charge 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 fin…

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.

Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

#45

Post by themartorana »

ikeboy wrote: post #29

>Publishers acquire this research free of charge 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 fin…

SciHub can and does do it for less. It's the whole point of the article.

Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

#46

Post by grondilu »

wrong_variable wrote: post #41
grondilu wrote: post #38

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?

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 c…

> 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.

Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

#47

Post by ikeboy »

themartorana wrote: post #45
ikeboy wrote: post #29

>Publishers acquire this research free of charge 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 fin…

SciHub can and does do it for less. It's the whole point of the article.

SciHub piggybacks on the publishers' work. Stealing the output of a company and giving it away does not mean you can do their work for less.

Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

#48

Post by merraksh »

grondilu wrote: post #38

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?

For instance, a major part of scientific research is done in US, isn't it?

A good part, roughly on par with Europe, Japan, Russia, and China (number of papers is hardly a measure of scientific production anyway):

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/20k5dk/top...

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.

[edit: typo]

Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

#49

Post by wrsh07 »

thaw13579 wrote: post #15

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.

Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

#50

Post by p4bl0 »

ikeboy wrote: post #32
jbmorgado wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If nobody paid, publishers wouldn't have revenue from access, and so would need to charge authors directly, which would make science costs go up.

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…).

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