The War to Free Science

The War to Free Science
vox.com

>Put another way: Publishers are still going to get paid. Open access just means the paychecks come at the front end.

Firstly, the fees imposed by journals are thousands of dollars, which is far too much for many researchers to pay. It would seemingly largely prevent the publication of independent research within such journals.

This was mentioned in the article:

>In fact, many academics still don’t publish in open access journals. One big reason: Some feel they’re less prestigious and lower quality, and that they push the publishing costs on the scientists.

However, the article seemingly (and contradictorily) earlier implies that Gold OA is a solution to pushing the cost onto the researchers:

>Academics are not paid for their article contributions to journals. They often have to pay fees to submit articles to journals and to publish.

However, under Gold OA this is only exacerbated, with large fees being everywhere on the publication-end. The readers don't have to pay, but now the authors do.

Additionally, this may create another pro-industry publication bias, as industry-funded studies may be more likely to have the money to publish in pay-to-publish journals, and this apparently has now been dubbed "e-publication bias" (bottom of https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/340/7753/Letters.full.pdf, also see http://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l1544).

Lastly, the article mentions predatory publishing, however fails to note that this phenomena is caused by Gold OA in the first place. In fact, it is sometimes specifically called "predatory open-access publishing". The idea behind predatory publishers is that Gold OA incentivizes publication (as they now get paid per-paper), leading them to seek out and accept as many papers as possible regardless of quality.

While open science certainly is in-line with my views, I'm not convinced that Gold OA is a good solution here.

Also, the actual DNS system doesn't have a way of redirecting you to another site when the record has been censored, so it's not very resilient in the first place.

Relevant similar site: https://dark.fail