Getting papers refereed and distributed does cost. I think many journals are now charging more than £1k for accepting papers for open access, conferences charge fees ~£.5k or more (+ travel). Of course you can submit to arXiv, but that's moderated - not refereed and is sponsored by wonderful people - but what if one day the people paying for it stop being so wonderful. In the past the cost of papers was paid on the d…
The yearly budget of arXiv is ~$1M.
I don't see a reason why science couldn't flourish on a non-anonymous message board such as reddit or twitter in place of peer review. This is all matter of momentum. And of fear of open criticism.
It is more subtle than this. Actually when having produced useful for business or politics knowledge they are hiding it, while calling others to disclose theirs. This is kind of cheating. Europe is on decline, it produces less intellectual input and so is trying this way to grab the IP of other guys without sharing to much of the little things they still can provide.
What you're saying is meaningless. This concerns knowledge that's already public. Open access simply means that laypeople and institutions would be able to access something for free that others are currently paying for. It's not secret in as much that books sold for profit aren't secret.
Getting papers refereed and distributed does cost. I think many journals are now charging more than £1k for accepting papers for open access, conferences charge fees ~£.5k or more (+ travel). Of course you can submit to arXiv, but that's moderated - not refereed and is sponsored by wonderful people - but what if one day the people paying for it stop being so wonderful. In the past the cost of papers was paid on the d…
The yearly budget of arXiv is ~$1M. I don't see a reason why science couldn't flourish on a non-anonymous message board such as reddit or twitter in place of peer review. This is all matter of momentum. And of fear of open criticism.
And a fear to introduce accountability for reviews: what if the review is technically wrong?
With the anonymous system we have today, there are no wrong reviews.
Getting papers refereed and distributed does cost. I think many journals are now charging more than £1k for accepting papers for open access, conferences charge fees ~£.5k or more (+ travel). Of course you can submit to arXiv, but that's moderated - not refereed and is sponsored by wonderful people - but what if one day the people paying for it stop being so wonderful. In the past the cost of papers was paid on the d…
In most fields, referees are volunteers, and the editors who coordinate them are volunteers or get some trivially tiny recompensation. Distribution costs of a paper should be about as high as those of a blog post.
There's more to running a journal than that - you have formatting editors who make the PDF look good and give it a thorough last read (finding for me several errors that peer review never found - missing or switched references, for example). The actual per-paper costs seem to be a few hundred dollars, as written in this article:
The yearly budget of arXiv is ~$1M. I don't see a reason why science couldn't flourish on a non-anonymous message board such as reddit or twitter in place of peer review. This is all matter of momentum. And of fear of open criticism.
And a fear to introduce accountability for reviews: what if the review is technically wrong? With the anonymous system we have today, there are no wrong reviews.
Ouch, you would be amazed at the trickery involved in refereeing.
Drop a couple of citations and you end up with a 90% probability of getting your desired reviewer...
Getting papers refereed and distributed does cost. I think many journals are now charging more than £1k for accepting papers for open access, conferences charge fees ~£.5k or more (+ travel). Of course you can submit to arXiv, but that's moderated - not refereed and is sponsored by wonderful people - but what if one day the people paying for it stop being so wonderful. In the past the cost of papers was paid on the d…
As already pointed out, the costs of peer review and distribution are tiny in comparison to what is actually charged. The $1000 cost thing looks like an improvement but isn't, really. It asks authors to pay so that the publisher can claim to support open access but without impacting their fatcat bottom line.
Elsevier et al are nothing but leeches on the back of the academic community. They provide zero benefit and need go to the fuck away.
And a fear to introduce accountability for reviews: what if the review is technically wrong? With the anonymous system we have today, there are no wrong reviews.
Ouch, you would be amazed at the trickery involved in refereeing. Drop a couple of citations and you end up with a 90% probability of getting your desired reviewer... And many more.
Ok my statement wasn't completely clear: in the current system there are by definition no wrong reviews
Getting papers refereed and distributed does cost. I think many journals are now charging more than £1k for accepting papers for open access, conferences charge fees ~£.5k or more (+ travel). Of course you can submit to arXiv, but that's moderated - not refereed and is sponsored by wonderful people - but what if one day the people paying for it stop being so wonderful. In the past the cost of papers was paid on the d…
In most fields, referees are volunteers, and the editors who coordinate them are volunteers or get some trivially tiny recompensation. Distribution costs of a paper should be about as high as those of a blog post.
You must be joking. There is a lot in the line for an academic journal and its website. First one need an submission and review system, after a paper accepted there is proofreading and art department, and editors also need to decide whether to invite someone write a commentary on which paper, and subsequent comment and response section if a paper raise questions/interest, then billing department and production for the physical magazines who also handle the preprints(EDIT: should be "reprints"). Finally the website platform which keeps all those digital versions of current and previous publications. I am just talking about this from an end user point of view, and I believe there are other things behind curtain we are not familiar such as deciding the future directions of a journal, writing press release, etc. Also journals do promote themselves, which inevitable incur costs.
Awesome. I do think all publicly funded research papers should be available. Research done by private companies using their own funds however shouldn't be.
Maybe if America had open access, things would of turned out a lot better for Aaron Swartz :(