241–250 of 313 posts
Can someone explain why an alternative hasn't popped up for these universally-hated publishers? What's so hard about hosting a bunch of documents?
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Elsevier owns copyrighted material, which it licenses to individuals and institutions for a fee. The fee is negotiated on a case-by-case basis, which is no different than any other intellectual property such as movies, music, books, or software. If a customer is unable or unwilling to pay the prevailing rate, then no access will be granted. The argument that Elsevier uses unpaid academic labor and therefore should fa…
It's not unpaid academic labor, it's actually exploitative labor. They charge the academics ~$3000 - 5000 to publish via any of their journals.
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What I find interesting is how open source hardware companies can coexist with their cheap clones. The Prusa i3 printer is a great example. An assembled Prusa costs $1000 while clones are $200, and yet the two options serve different markets. If you’re a broke hobbyist you get the clones, and they take a lot of work to keep running. If you’re operating a school, business, or makerspace you get the Prusa because it’s…
One thing the layman loses with no IPR is the ability to tell which are the "real" Prusa, or the real brakes for their bike, or whatever. That is one thing that causes clear and imminent harm. I'm pretty communist in my thinking, rail hard against established IPR structures, but most of it would be sensible IMO if the balance were shifted back toward the demos . Things have been allowed to slip away from the IP deals…
Can someone explain why an alternative hasn't popped up for these universally-hated publishers? What's so hard about hosting a bunch of documents?
The problem isn’t document hosting, it’s that the journals serve as a proxy for research quality, and everyone wants to publish in journals that have high (perceived and/or actual) impact. To effect real change the editors and prominent authors will need to leave, like when Machine Learning was forked into JMLR
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This could be an extremely interesting legal argument, but I suppose the language used requires a request in 'writing' of some sort, which I suppose HTTP requests would fail.
how about a request form that ostensibly takes an email address and a name, and an optional text field and then automates the process of sending the paper (or a hidden (unique) link to that paper) to that email address. it need not store those details anywhere, except that it optionally sends an email to the author (if there is a message). the only concern is spam.
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PLOS is a top-tier indexed refereed open-access journal.
If by "top-tier" you mean "sufficient to impress the hiring committees at Stanford or Harvard", sorry, no. Personally, having no interest in faculty jobs to begin with, I'd vastly prefer to deal with PLOS than Elsevier, but good luck persuading the average biosciences postdoc to choose it over the Holy Triad of prestige journals.
There can be only one reasonable explanation how such a strong disequilibrium has been kept in status quo. Money is flowing to the right hands. Which, like it or not, is the definition of corruption.
I never understood why university libraries are not making the journals themselves instead of having them done by companies and paying for the subscription. Every university would have like 5 or 6 journals and pay everything for those and all the scientific articles would be free. I mean elife does it and it is great.
> Traditionally, the publishers accept papers for publication for free but charge steep subscription fees To my knowledge (academic family and partner in NZ) this is false, publishers charge for both publication _and_ reading in general.
I think this must depend on your field. In mine, it’s generally free to publish, unless you want color figures or go over the page limit.
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The problem isn’t document hosting, it’s that the journals serve as a proxy for research quality, and everyone wants to publish in journals that have high (perceived and/or actual) impact. To effect real change the editors and prominent authors will need to leave, like when Machine Learning was forked into JMLR
So the world's most prestigious universities who have a problem with the status quo band together and lend their own credibility to a new platform that they run together. Cut out the middle-man.
Without changing this perception at the subfield level, academic publishing isn’t going to change. Citation counting and h-index ranking just plays too large a role in hiring, promotion, tenure, and funding decisions.
What might help is for an established researcher to publish a splashy important result in a new open venue. It doesn’t happen much because publishing Nature-worthy research in “some upstart open access journal” leaves a lot of prestige and fanfare on the table.