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

wired.com

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

#81

Post by ikeboy »

riscy wrote: post #75
ikeboy wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

This is false. If all they did was host pdfs everyone would just use arxiv.

See http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-scie... for a good overview of all the sides here.

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

#82

Post by SeanDav »

ikeboy wrote: post #35
SeanDav wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

Revenue goes towards publishing expenses. Why don't you consider their subsidization of publishing a contribution to the research?

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.

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

#83

Post by frobozz »

ikeboy wrote: post #34
frobozz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You haven't given any distinction. Do you not consider publishing a service?

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.

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

#84

Post by fintler »

mizzao wrote: post #70
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.

Preprints offer a way forward here, allowing scientists to both publish in "prestigious" venues and disseminate their work more easily: See for example http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/science/asap-bio-biologist...

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.

https://www.ieee.org/documents/author_faq.pdf

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

#85

Post by p4bl0 »

ikeboy wrote: post #57
aeorgnoieang wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You may think peer review is over-rated.

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.

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

#86

Post by jeffwass »

praseodym wrote: post #69
jeffwass wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've hit the nail on the head. 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…

Usually you can publish a draft version of your paper, but not the version that is edited by the journal. They should be mostly the same, though.

Often people post to the Arxiv as well, clearly not formatted the same way as the journal publication. But in many cases the exact same text.

I'm not sure if some journals like Nature prevent or discourage you from doing this.

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

#87

Post by ufo »

ikeboy wrote: post #51
p4bl0 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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. T…

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.

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

#88

Post by ikeboy »

SeanDav wrote: post #82
ikeboy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Revenue goes towards publishing expenses. Why don't you consider their subsidization of publishing a contribution to the research?

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.

The distribution isn't where the cost comes from, it's editing, reviewing, and so on.

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

#89

Post by linuxhansl »

harry8 wrote: post #62

Article blocked me for using adblock. I don't use adblock. So I don't read wired and I'm confident I'm missing nothing.

Same here. I do use adblock, but I had nothing block on (or referenced from) the article's page. Shame, guess I won't be readying Wired anymore.

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

#90

Post by ikeboy »

frobozz wrote: post #83
ikeboy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven't given any distinction. Do you not consider publishing a service?

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 s…

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.

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