Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

news.sciencemag.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 154 posts

Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#31

Post by dougmccune »

kenshaw wrote: post #25

Is it not possible to create a separate foundation / organization that manages peer-reviewed, open-access journals for multiple scientific fields? I realize the costs involved in asking academics to review submissions, etc., but couldn't a small $10-$15 million grant for an organization be enough to kickstart an open journal consortium? Even if they did require small review fees from submissions ($25-$50), I feel tha…

The problem isn't the technical implementation of such a system, it's getting the reputation prestige. eLife is an example of a journal attempting to go from zero to elite right out of the gate, but the solution to that is to throw a ton of money at the problem. Their last financials show it cost them about $14k/article to publish. So either you spend A LOT of money and make the prestige play quickly, or you do it cheaper (PeerJ, PLoS One, etc) and struggle for many years to build up the prestige.

Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#33

Post by mathattack »

p4bl0 wrote: post #13
philip1209 wrote: post #2

> "The Gates Foundation will also pay the author fees charged by many open-access journals."

That's where the remaining problem is. Funding agencies should really stop kneeling in front of publishers and refuse to pay for this, or at least fix themselves a maximum price per publication. Currently publishers ask for $1000 to $5000 in some cases, which is completely insane. I'm not denying the cost of publication. But there is that actual cost, and then there is the prices demanded by publishers, which looks m…

Journals are an amazingly profitable business. There's a reason that Warren Buffett likes them. :-)

Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#34

Post by wmf »

dekhn wrote: post #16
bennyg wrote: post #3

Why don't they just pay for all of the major science publications to have free access for everyone - not just requiring it of the authors they subsidize?

It would be an interesting experiment to negotiate a single annual payment to all journals to make them publish all articles in an easily downloadable and extractable form.

I guess the publishers would not accept any payment less than their current (very large) profits, so you'd basically be locking in those profits and the system wouldn't get any cheaper.

Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#35

Post by markbao »

dougmccune wrote: post #26
markbao wrote: post #15

This is really great, but to play devil's advocate, does this hurt the authors? That is, does this mean that they can't publish in Cell or another reputable journal, and would this discourage them from taking funding from the Gates Foundation? As an article in The Winnower said, science is not disinterested and there are egos involved. "We got published in Cell " or "Our paper is in Science " still speaks prestige.

Almost all publishers and journals have adopted a "hybrid" model, where you can publish in a paywall journal but pay a fee to have your particular article made available OA. I think if you want to publish in Cell and get your article OA all you have to do is pay $5k. At Sage our OA fees for hybrid journals range a lot, but are typically either $1,500 or $3,000 (source: http://www.uk.sagepub.com/repository/binaries/pd…

That's what I thought at first, but the language from the original post seemed ambiguous—that it could only be published in Open Access Journals, and I also couldn't find OA costs for Cell or Science. I did find this page from Elsevier, though, and it looks like it ranges from $500 to $5,000: http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-access-option...

Thanks for the first-hand knowledge about Sage. Presumably, though, at a one-time price of $1,500–$5,000, publishers e.g. Elsevier weren't making much from keeping them closed-access in the first place, were they?

Not sure if the trend of more APCs going from grant funders to publishers is a good one, but probably better that the grant funders pay than those who can't afford access.

Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#36

Post by revelation »

dougmccune wrote: post #26
markbao wrote: post #15

This is really great, but to play devil's advocate, does this hurt the authors? That is, does this mean that they can't publish in Cell or another reputable journal, and would this discourage them from taking funding from the Gates Foundation? As an article in The Winnower said, science is not disinterested and there are egos involved. "We got published in Cell " or "Our paper is in Science " still speaks prestige.

Almost all publishers and journals have adopted a "hybrid" model, where you can publish in a paywall journal but pay a fee to have your particular article made available OA. I think if you want to publish in Cell and get your article OA all you have to do is pay $5k. At Sage our OA fees for hybrid journals range a lot, but are typically either $1,500 or $3,000 (source: http://www.uk.sagepub.com/repository/binaries/pd…

So, it's a ripoff? These numbers sound completely made-up.

Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#37

Post by dougmccune »

dang wrote: post #23
philip1209 wrote: post #2

> "The Gates Foundation will also pay the author fees charged by many open-access journals."

It's surprising what a big deal "author fees" are. A historian told me recently that when submitting articles to one major journal, there's a checkbox saying "I want this work to be in the public domain". If you select it, the system automatically adds $5,432 to your bill. That wasn't the exact number, but it was about $5k. In his field, and surely for most academics, that's prohibitive, and an odd way to treat peopl…

$5k is about the top of the scale. Nature, Cell, etc can get that. More typical is the $1,500 range (OA publisher PLoS One is about that). One of the most interesting things to see is that the big winner of the APC (article processing charge) landrush is Elsevier. The Wellcome Trust published data about who they are paying APCs to, and the biggest player was Elsevier: http://blog.wellcome.ac.uk/2014/03/28/the-cost-of-open-acces... So it's interesting to see the (at least short-term) winners in the rise of APC-based open access are still the same big publishers, at least for now.

Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#38

Post by dougmccune »

revelation wrote: post #36
dougmccune wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all publishers and journals have adopted a "hybrid" model, where you can publish in a paywall journal but pay a fee to have your particular article made available OA. I think if you want to publish in Cell and get your article OA all you have to do is pay $5k. At Sage our OA fees for hybrid journals range a lot, but are typically either $1,500 or $3,000 (source: http://www.uk.sagepub.com/repository/binaries/pd…

So, it's a ripoff? These numbers sound completely made-up.

Well, there's some price point at which if everyone paid the OA fee (effectively making your entire journal open access) then the revenue would about equal the revenue you get from traditional paywall subscriptions for that journal, and the publisher wouldn't care one way or the other.

In reality it's almost impossible these days to figure out what the paywall revenue from a single journal title is anymore, since everything is bundled in huge packages. But yeah, more or less the fees are based on what the publishers think authors will pay based on the prestige offered by the journal. There are people trying to change the typical price point of OA publishing (PeerJ's $99/author fee comes to mind), but there's A LOT of intertia in academia.

Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#39

Post by ujjwalg »

I love what they are trying to do. The entire scientific publishing industry is messed up and can use any help it can get. I wrote a blog about how terrible the scientific publishing system is sometime back.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20140922193017-368522...

Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#40

Post by philip1209 »

dougmccune wrote: post #31
kenshaw wrote: post #25

Is it not possible to create a separate foundation / organization that manages peer-reviewed, open-access journals for multiple scientific fields? I realize the costs involved in asking academics to review submissions, etc., but couldn't a small $10-$15 million grant for an organization be enough to kickstart an open journal consortium? Even if they did require small review fees from submissions ($25-$50), I feel tha…

The problem isn't the technical implementation of such a system, it's getting the reputation prestige. eLife is an example of a journal attempting to go from zero to elite right out of the gate, but the solution to that is to throw a ton of money at the problem. Their last financials show it cost them about $14k/article to publish. So either you spend A LOT of money and make the prestige play quickly, or you do it ch…

I wonder if you could have peers sign others' research on a Github-like platform using PGP. You could then use a graph model to quantitatively determine reputation based on who reviews which article.
Post reply on HN