Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals • Hacker News Board

Re: Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals

#151

Post by blululu » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 4:46 PM UTC

D-Machine wrote: post #67

blululu wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen more than one PI at an R1 universities with multiple Nature publications use this heuristic. I would not call them incompetent.

Do you not notice the circularity of your reasoning here? Also I didn't say incompetent, I said "not very". More competent researchers make journal rep only a very small factor, and it is not via the "high rep = more trustworthy" direction (which is the bad heuristic), it is "pay-to-publish journals = not trustworthy" (better heuristic). Once you have ruled out a publication being in a trash journal, reputation is on…

There is no reasoning. I gave you a statement of fact:

I have personally seen highly talented and successful researchers use the heuristic of journal quality when looking at the state of their field. These people are highly competent by any standard. If you want to play word games with negation you could say they are not not very competent.

Re: Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals

#152

Post by StacyRawls » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 7:02 PM UTC

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Re: Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals

#153

Post by jpeloquin » Wed, Mar 11, 2026, 6:32 PM UTC

shellfishgene wrote: post #148

jpeloquin wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article's discussion of how the open access mandate works is wrong. Federally funded research, when published (even in a closed-access journal) must be deposited in https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ or a similar repository. Edit: OA advocates have won pretty much everything we wanted, there's not much left to be outraged over.

But that's what the article says? The (correct) criticism of that system is that the publishers just replaced the subscription fees with article processing charges for OA publication, and still profit from public funding the same as before.

Post-mandate, I've been submitting to closed access journals and getting OA on the side for free due to the mandate. Pre-mandate, I only submitted to paid OA journals, and paid ~ $3k each time for it.

The article claims the solution is "every government grant should stipulate that the research it supports can’t be published in a for-profit journal. That’s it! If the public paid for it, it shouldn’t be paywalled." That's an equivocation fallacy. Whether a for-profit journal publishes the work at some point is orthogonal to whether it is available un-paywalled, which it now must be.

You say that publishers replaced subscription fees with APC charges, but I haven't seen this happening when I've submitted papers recently. Journals need new submissions or they lose mindshare. Authors are price-sensitive and will shop around. Starting a new journal isn't that hard (it can been done as a side project) so high margins will likely be undercut. I have no idea why the author chose to pay a $12k APC; they probably didn't need to. Finally, closed-access journals will have residual subscription income from their closed-access archives for many decades; if the author wants to kill that income stream off, their proposed solution will not do it. So while I agree with the article's condemnation of the publishers, who are certainly no friends of science, I think it's wildly off-base on pretty much every other point.

Author-pays APCs are even potentially a good thing as long as they aren't much higher than the cost of publication. Universal APCs would provide some pressure against publishing many low-value papers that aren't really worth the time it takes to read them. The paper spam is kind of getting out of control.

Re: Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals

#154

Post by shellfishgene » Sun, Mar 15, 2026, 9:58 AM UTC

jpeloquin wrote: post #153

shellfishgene wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's what the article says? The (correct) criticism of that system is that the publishers just replaced the subscription fees with article processing charges for OA publication, and still profit from public funding the same as before.

Post-mandate, I've been submitting to closed access journals and getting OA on the side for free due to the mandate. Pre-mandate, I only submitted to paid OA journals, and paid ~ $3k each time for it. The article claims the solution is "every government grant should stipulate that the research it supports can’t be published in a for-profit journal. That’s it! If the public paid for it, it shouldn’t be paywalled." Tha…

I don't think authors are very price sensitive. If they can get their paper into a good journal they will pay the charges, as long as they are not absurdly high. After all, it's not their personal money, often the employer also pays, as they also need high impact papers to generate funding. Nobody who can get their paper into Nature will publish with PLOS Biology instead because it's cheaper. I'm pretty sure if I went to my institute director and said I need 10k APC to publish this in Nature but ran out of funding they would be annoyed, but still find the money.

In the end the details do not really matter, it is still absurd that a high percentage of the money paid in whatever way is just profit for company investors, for a system in which 80% of the skilled work is done for fee by the scientists.

I'm not sure if APCs will reduce the paper flood. Especially if the APCs are near the real cost of publishing, having a published paper will always be worth more to the authors. This is how we get all the junk journals that publish anything as long as you pay after all.