“You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous” • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by acidflask » Mon, Apr 18, 2016, 9:47 PM UTC

ikeboy wrote: post #110

MagnumOpus wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually, chemistry and physics do quite well with nonprofit publishers. Compare the profit margins of for-profit publishers with non-profit ones like the American Chemical Society. In 2015, the ACS made a $10m profit on $500m gross revenue, a much smaller profit margin.

http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/about/aboutacs/financial.h...

The smaller American Physical Society made http://www.aps.org/about/governance/annual-reports/

So yes, it is possible to have high quality publications produced on much smaller margins. The question is whether it is possible to provide similar services for similar margins in a for-profit context. Given that for-profit companies, by definition, seek to extract the highest possible profits on what they do, one should really question whether it makes any sense for for-profit publishers to have the stranglehold they have on academic intellectual property.

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

#152

Post by frobozz » Mon, Apr 18, 2016, 9:57 PM UTC

ikeboy wrote: post #90

frobozz wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ho…

It's not about principles, it's about efficiency. 30% (if that is the number) is a huge markup. That's a lot of money that could be being spent on research and is instead mostly going to the shareholders of five publishing companies[0] . A few years ago, Harvard was spending about $3.5m on journal subscriptions[1]. That's about a million from one (admittedly big-budget) university alone, enough to cover the financial support payments of nearly three PhD students.

Part of the core business of universities is the production of research artefacts. Why shouldn't that core business also include making those artefacts available to others? Why not a subsidiary owned by a consortium of universities? Why not an organisation like EPSRC or AHRC, or even a national pan-discipline service provider?

Profit is what's left after the expenses have been taken care of. Salaries are an expense. Workers earning a salary are not making a profit, they are being remunerated for their labour.

Subcontracting to private companies is a good thing when your need for their services is subject to surge, or when your need for their services is so low that the overheads of DIY are prohibitive (Don't set up a whole in-house printing and binding facility just to do your glossy annual report, don't hire a full-time cleaner to keep your 5-desk office clean). If you are paying another company to provide a full-time, predictable service that is strongly aligned with your core business, then that is wasteful.

[0]http://phys.org/news/2015-06-companies-academic-publishing.h... [1]https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-univ...

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

#153

Post by AnthonyMouse » Mon, Apr 18, 2016, 10:01 PM UTC

ikeboy wrote: post #53

p4bl0 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The large open access journals that don't have independent funding charge rates within the same order of magnitude. What evidence do you have that an order of magnitude reduction is actually possible at scale? How do you explain the expenses of both traditional publishers and open access ones, and how would you eliminate them?

> How do you explain the expenses of both traditional publishers and open access ones, and how would you eliminate them?

By not granting any copyright to publicly funded work. That doesn't actually prohibit a publisher from charging readers for access, but it would require them to charge the market price for publication of digital works out of copyright. Then we see if competition can significantly drive down costs.

Which we all know perfectly well that it would.

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

#154

Post by ikeboy » Mon, Apr 18, 2016, 10:04 PM UTC

acidflask wrote: post #151

ikeboy wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually, chemistry and physics do quite well with nonprofit publishers. Compare the profit margins of for-profit publishers with non-profit ones like the American Chemical Society. In 2015, the ACS made a $10m profit on $500m gross revenue, a much smaller profit margin. http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/about/aboutacs/financial.h... The smaller American Physical Society made http://www.aps.org/about/governance/annua…

Why does the logic of "taxpayer funded research should be free" suddenly change when the publisher is a non profit? If that logic is valid, why is the $500 million fine?

I should probably have said "similar charges" as I said later. Reducing the margins to nothing can at best reduce the cost by 30% or so, which I doubt would satisfy most open access advocates; given that, the real concern has nothing to do with publishers' profit.

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

#155

Post by ikeboy » Mon, Apr 18, 2016, 10:12 PM UTC

frobozz wrote: post #152

ikeboy wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ho…

It's not about principles, it's about efficiency. 30% (if that is the number) is a huge markup. That's a lot of money that could be being spent on research and is instead mostly going to the shareholders of five publishing companies[0] . A few years ago, Harvard was spending about $3.5m on journal subscriptions[1]. That's about a million from one (admittedly big-budget) university alone, enough to cover the financial…

>It's not about principles, it's about efficiency. 30% (if that is the number) is a huge markup.

Then solve that by creating a new non profit that charges costs, or remove barriers to entering the business, and so on.

Complaining about the profit margins of a business while ignoring the reasons their profit margins are high (it's almost always because of barriers to entry) isn't useful.

>Why shouldn't that core business also include making those artefacts available to others? Why not a subsidiary owned by a consortium of universities?

That's a good idea, and I'd be all for it if they can do it. But while there isn't such a thing, complaining about high profits by companies providing a service is pointless, except to the extent you have an alternative or are pushing for one to be implemented.

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

#156

Post by ikeboy » Mon, Apr 18, 2016, 10:14 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #153

ikeboy wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The large open access journals that don't have independent funding charge rates within the same order of magnitude. What evidence do you have that an order of magnitude reduction is actually possible at scale? How do you explain the expenses of both traditional publishers and open access ones, and how would you eliminate them?

> How do you explain the expenses of both traditional publishers and open access ones, and how would you eliminate them? By not granting any copyright to publicly funded work. That doesn't actually prohibit a publisher from charging readers for access, but it would require them to charge the market price for publication of digital works out of copyright. Then we see if competition can significantly drive down costs.…

The result would be that publishers charge for publication, similar to current open access options. It could be that greater usage of open access would bring down the cost, but I'm not sure.

Definitely the number of grants would go down as the cost of publishing starts being factored in, although this may be partly or fully outweighed by the reduction in universities' costs.

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

#157

Post by pbhjpbhj » Tue, Apr 19, 2016, 12:48 AM UTC

cableshaft wrote: post #149

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe your pragmatic approach is right but I don't think I could settle for "we'll do this for this company because our politicians are easily bought". The real solution seems to be to get politicians with better ethics or create laws that force them to comply with good morals ... then of course you need a strong judiciary.

Ah yes, the "if only we voted in the right politicians". My Dad likes to make this argument till he's blue in the face, and those people never get elected (and it's a different set of people for every individual, I bet you'd disagree with most of his choices). Of course it would fix things if all the right people got elected. But this is the real world, and that reality almost never, ever happens. It's much easier to…

>It's much easier to get specific protections passed, especially ones that benefit one or more corporations, than it is to make sure "no one gets elected whose vote can be bought and believes in things different from me!" //

It's a very good thing when people get elected who have different beliefs to me as I'm not always right.

Also, a politician who sides with me because of a "bribe" is not a good thing IMO; it rather suggests that I'm on the side that can't win through fair play, or indeed that I'm on the side that favours those corrupt enough to pervert democracy in their favour because of their wealth.

I don't think there's any evidence to show that a copyright term less than life will damage artists, nor reduce impetus to create works. Indeed works entering the public domain appear to stimulate creative work.

I don't agree with your "too rich to legislate against the preference of" arguments for Disney. Indeed their wealth suggests strongly that the balance between public protected monopoly and free use of works has been lost.

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

#158

Post by wizzard0 » Tue, Apr 19, 2016, 4:14 AM UTC

ikeboy wrote: post #156

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you explain the expenses of both traditional publishers and open access ones, and how would you eliminate them? By not granting any copyright to publicly funded work. That doesn't actually prohibit a publisher from charging readers for access, but it would require them to charge the market price for publication of digital works out of copyright. Then we see if competition can significantly drive down costs.…

The result would be that publishers charge for publication, similar to current open access options. It could be that greater usage of open access would bring down the cost, but I'm not sure. Definitely the number of grants would go down as the cost of publishing starts being factored in, although this may be partly or fully outweighed by the reduction in universities' costs.

arXiv charges neither for reading nor for publication. And for-profit publishers have to be profitable to exist, which necessarily incurs costs on authors and readers.

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

#159

Post by p4bl0 » Tue, Apr 19, 2016, 7:51 AM UTC

ikeboy wrote: post #148

p4bl0 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pfffffff. Once again: the curation is not performed by the publisher, but by the editorial board and the reviewers, who are researchers, and are not paid by the publishers for this work.

A cursory google search turns up plenty of counterexamples. See http://blog.journals.cambridge.org/2012/06/14/recruiting-a-j... and http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2002/02/editorial-boards-s... I'll note that even PLOS medicine wasn't able to get editors for free, as an open access journal http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/s/competing-interests-...

Paid academic journal editors are rare exceptions.

From one of your own links:

    Carol Barnes, professor of psychology and neurology at the
    University of Arizona in Tucson, is a reviewing editor at
    the Journal of Neuroscience, a 3-year appointment for which
    *she receives no compensation*.
    (…)
    Barnes has received funding from the university to hire an
    assistant to provide clerical support to assist her with
    the manuscript review process. She considers herself
    fortunate, because "without this help, I would have had to
    decline this position."

Not only she was still paid by the university for whats seems to be a full time job during 3 years according to the article, but in addition to that the university, not the publisher, paid for an assistant to this job!

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

#160

Post by AnthonyMouse » Tue, Apr 19, 2016, 7:53 AM UTC

ikeboy wrote: post #156

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you explain the expenses of both traditional publishers and open access ones, and how would you eliminate them? By not granting any copyright to publicly funded work. That doesn't actually prohibit a publisher from charging readers for access, but it would require them to charge the market price for publication of digital works out of copyright. Then we see if competition can significantly drive down costs.…

The result would be that publishers charge for publication, similar to current open access options. It could be that greater usage of open access would bring down the cost, but I'm not sure. Definitely the number of grants would go down as the cost of publishing starts being factored in, although this may be partly or fully outweighed by the reduction in universities' costs.

> Definitely the number of grants would go down as the cost of publishing starts being factored in, although this may be partly or fully outweighed by the reduction in universities' costs.

Universities are paying essentially all of the cost one way or another now, how could it not be fully outweighed? It would be more than fully outweighed because the universities would no longer have to pay the publishers the amount that constitutes the monopoly rent from the copyright.

Meanwhile the public gets free access to the research which increases its utility.