Here's the thing with Wired:
http://i.imgur.com/ONOt88S.png
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.
“You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”
101–110 of 165 posts
Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”
#102I 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 incre…
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. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...
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
Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, if all of those things were non-rivalrous, and had neglible marginal cost.
So no tolls on non full roads?
In the UK we have only a few toll roads, and they are optional. So yes, it is entirely possible to have a road system functioning without tolls.
Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 p…
> 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.
Agreed, but all taxpayers fund only a portion of the worldwide research and benefit from all of it, so the trade-off is still in favor of sharing.
Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”
#105I 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 incre…
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.
Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
To cite just one example, Elsevier consistently reports over $1b/yr profit on $3b/yr revenue. Not exactly "almost nothing". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/mit-open-access/open-acc...
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.
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/people/person.asp?p...
Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
>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.
Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone paid by the publisher needs to look at every paper. Some journals calculate internal costs of up to $40,000 per paper (see http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-scie... ). You seem to be skeptical of such claims, but simply asserting that the expenses don't exist isn't enough.
> 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…
>If so, what is the use of that?
To prevent bad papers from getting through. Editors at a paper are the first filter, peer reviewers are the second.
Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
So no tolls on non full roads?
In the UK we have only a few toll roads, and they are optional. So yes, it is entirely possible to have a road system functioning without tolls.
That's not relevant. Of course there are multiple ways to fund something. You can pay higher taxes upfront, or pay less and have the users fund it.
The question was whether tolls are inherently immoral.
Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.