The Dangerous "Research Works Act"
techcrunch.com
The Dangerous "Research Works Act"
1–10 of 33 posts
Re: The Dangerous "Research Works Act"
#2I think the author is not looking deep enough. Universities form and fund consortiums all the time for one reason or another. The US Government funds even more and has more resources. If either the universities, or the US government, wanted academic research to be public by default, they could bypass the publishers entirely and do so with comparatively little effort. In this case the "publishers" are merely the fall guys. Something much more important is going on.
Re: The Dangerous "Research Works Act"
#3I think the author is not looking deep enough. Universities form and fund consortiums all the time for one reason or another. The US Government funds even more and has more resources. If either the universities, or the US government, wanted academic research to be public by default, they could bypass the publishers entirely and do so with comparatively little effort. In this case the "publishers" are merely the fall…
It isn't true that the US government could easily bypass the publishers. They want the research to be distributed, and peer reviewed, and have historically relied on the publishers to do that. The NIH (the federal agency that dispenses the bulk of academic funding in the US) took the view that they could get better distribution terms on behalf of the US public, with their open access mandate in 2008. It's this policy that the journal publishers are trying to reverse. Distribution, and peer review, are evolving, but they haven't evolved to the point where the US government could easily bypass the publishers.
Re: The Dangerous "Research Works Act"
#4This article is already a little bit out of date: It strikes me as unusual to describe 6,094 as "over 5,500" :)
Re: The Dangerous "Research Works Act"
#5This article is already a little bit out of date: It strikes me as unusual to describe 6,094 as "over 5,500" :)
good point - that part of the post was written yesterday, and since then the boycott numbers have gone over 6,000!
Re: The Dangerous "Research Works Act"
#6I think the author is not looking deep enough. Universities form and fund consortiums all the time for one reason or another. The US Government funds even more and has more resources. If either the universities, or the US government, wanted academic research to be public by default, they could bypass the publishers entirely and do so with comparatively little effort. In this case the "publishers" are merely the fall…
While the public does have an interest in research becoming public after a reasonable period of time, I think the government is going to have a hard time declaring that it wants to unilaterally sidestep a multibillion dollar industry that is crucial to science as it is practiced today, and an even harder time getting scientists to accept whatever solution it comes up with, since publishing in high quality, peer-reviewed journals is key to job advancement in most of academia.
Re: The Dangerous "Research Works Act"
#7> The journal industry already has a vice-like grip on the research institutions. They can keep raising the subscription prices, and, to stay alive, the research institutions have to pay up.
While it's generally true that research institutions aren't generally willing to consider declining to subscribe, they aren't entirely helpless. A couple years ago, in response to huge price increases from the Nature Publishing Group, the University of California system organized a (moderately effective) boycott, where scientists would not submit papers to any NPG journal [1].
[1] http://chronicle.com/article/U-of-California-Tries-Just/6582...
Re: The Dangerous "Research Works Act"
#8> The journal industry already has a vice-like grip on the research institutions. They can keep raising the subscription prices, and, to stay alive, the research institutions have to pay up. While it's generally true that research institutions aren't generally willing to consider declining to subscribe, they aren't entirely helpless. A couple years ago, in response to huge price increases from the Nature Publishing G…
You're right, there are cases of boycotts like this.
Another interesting case was when the whole editorial body of the journal "Topology" resigned in 2006 because they thought that its owner, Elsevier, was charging too high a price for subscriptions. Those editors then set up a rival journal, called Journal of Topology.
There is an interesting letter here from the editors of the journal explaining their reasoning behind their mass resignation http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/topology-letter.pdf
Re: The Dangerous "Research Works Act"
#9> The journal industry already has a vice-like grip on the research institutions. They can keep raising the subscription prices, and, to stay alive, the research institutions have to pay up. While it's generally true that research institutions aren't generally willing to consider declining to subscribe, they aren't entirely helpless. A couple years ago, in response to huge price increases from the Nature Publishing G…
How was it effective?
Re: The Dangerous "Research Works Act"
#10I think the author is not looking deep enough. Universities form and fund consortiums all the time for one reason or another. The US Government funds even more and has more resources. If either the universities, or the US government, wanted academic research to be public by default, they could bypass the publishers entirely and do so with comparatively little effort. In this case the "publishers" are merely the fall…
1 -- I don't see what you're trying to imply, could you come out and say it?
2 -- Actually, the publishers do have a lot of power. The universities are stuck in a bad equilibrium (in the game theory sense) -- if any of them individually deviates (by not subscribing to popular/restrictive journals and not publishing in them), that university is going to be the one to get hurt.
The only way out for universities is if they all cooperate and decide to ditch the restrictive journals. There are movements toward this right now (against Elsevier, for instance), but it's very difficult to gain traction. You can't just pick up the red phone to every university president and say, "hey guys, stop publishing in these journals, I set up a whole different process over here!" The journals have the prestige, so they have the power for now.