51–60 of 143 posts
This cost will be paid by scientists, rather than by the readers. In other words, the papers will be free to read, but won't be free to publish.
I know as a fact that smaller research groups struggle to pay current publishing fees, and as a matter of fact the EU decision will increase them, making the situation worse.
That's incredibly stupid. The publishing of scientific papers has a cost, in terms of editorial service, proofreading, typesetting. This cost will be paid by scientists, rather than by the readers. In other words, the papers will be free to read, but won't be free to publish. I know as a fact that smaller research groups struggle to pay current publishing fees, and as a matter of fact the EU decision will increase th…
Publishers now don't even do editorial service. They give you a template you must follow and the actual (free) reviewers tell you if you write good english or not.
Shift cost to author and grant agencies then. A couple of studies I have read says it costs about $1500 to review edit and publish an article. In addition several thousand dolars of volunteer time is provided by editors and reviewers. If the subscribers wont be paying, then costs will shifted to the author. Some free online journals already only charge the author.
Why? whats next? Free newspapers.. free travel.. let's close all businesses.
However, free newspapers and travel sounds good to me.
If all/most resources were free it would then be just a matter of deciding which were worth spending your time on.
There doesn't really seem to be much negative, other than current business models fading away. However, I don't think most people would care much if all businesses did close and were replaced with a different economic model. (Not that I have one in mind, just that I don't think we need to be attached to the current business model)
Why on earth do people think this is to the detriment of publishers? This will effectively just lock in their profits by forcing all eu grants to include the cost of payments to publishers to make research papers open access. It just means the taxpayer is now paying for open access instead of individuals having to pay up themselves. Note I'm not saying this is a bad thing, and it is possibly worth publicly subsidisin…
The goal is for all public scientific research to be available to the public for free, not to smash middle-men. If your goal is to smash middle-men, you'll be smashing all day and all night for the rest of your life, and middle-men are generally better at smashing than you are.
Also, if you look at your job, you may be a middle-man yourself. Most upper middle-class people are.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does however provide a limit on how much money each publisher can extract from a paper, and makes things far more transparent. It also makes free or cheaper services more competitive.
> It does however provide a limit on how much money each publisher can extract from a paper. Why should we accept publishers to decide on what this limit should be? Currently it can be as high as $5000. For hosting a PDF. This is a total waste of (mostly public) money. > It also makes free or cheaper services more competitive. No because as long as we permit to those publishers to exists and exercise their copyrights…
I'm not sure there's a good way of limiting how much companies are allowed to charge for a service.
What the funding bodies can do, however, is limit the amount of money in a grant that can be spent on publishing costs. That's far easier.
> No because as long as we permit to those publishers to exists and exercise their copyrights on prestigious journal title, their is a big inertia that incentivize researchers to publish with the publishers that hold the prestigious journal.
There is a big inertia, but currently the system makes big journals just as financially attractive as small journals or free places to publish because there's no upfront cost. If big journals cost a lot of money and small/free journals don't, then there's actually a force pushing towards cheaper options. It changes the customer to one that has more control (the funding body).
There are interesting initiatives like the Wellcome Trust's project: http://wellcomeopenresearch.org/
I'm also not sure what you're suggesting with "exercise their copyrights on prestigious journal title".
> Bibliometrics is the game of the publishers, and coincidentally, the biggest bibliometrics tools are made and sold by… publishers.
I think this comes from the fact that the metadata around publications is unfortunately often not available in a decent form, and the people who actually have the data that's necessary for analysing these kinds of things is publishers, so anyone who wants to do certain types of analysis will benefit from either being in or partnering with a publisher.
[disclaimer, working with article and grant data is what I do at Digital Science]
*European Union
Just wait till you see how many people use "America" when they mean "The United States of America".
Clearly the term "America" either disambiguates to a continent or a country, and most assume the country.
"Europe," on the other hand, really is a continent, so the term has a completely different meaning than the EU, although it would be reasonable for the two to be synonymous eventually, they clearly are not currently.
Anyway, it seems reasonable to use the term America as shorthand, instead of U.S.A., as it's pretty obvious what you mean.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't that exactly what search engines are for? I.e., ranking work based on a complex mix of both content value and authority?
Yes, improvements in search will help, but the costs won't go down that easily. In Google's case, the initial seeding of page rank was quite manual. And then think of the cost of upkeep - people are trying to game search engines continuously, Google has to update its algorithms on a consistent basis, content farms have profited enormously at various points of time and needed to be literally programmed against, and fi…
Why on earth do people think this is to the detriment of publishers? This will effectively just lock in their profits by forcing all eu grants to include the cost of payments to publishers to make research papers open access. It just means the taxpayer is now paying for open access instead of individuals having to pay up themselves. Note I'm not saying this is a bad thing, and it is possibly worth publicly subsidisin…
In the UK, 'green route' or self-archiving means that, after a moratorium, you can put your paper on your institution's website. The moratorium could be three years, so it's still highly restrictive and locks in commercial publishers' profits.
My view is that a 'knowledge commons' system could easily work. Wikipedia apparently spends $50 million in total. I believe a similar amount of funding would easily support an academic publishing ecosystem in which publishing and reading are free.
I present some more detail here: https://medium.com/@jimmytidey/designing-knowledge-commons-t...