[HN Gopher] Open-access publishing fees deter researchers in the...
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Open-access publishing fees deter researchers in the global south
Author : NmAmDa
Score : 48 points
Date : 2022-02-19 05:35 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| qualudeheart wrote:
| Yet another case of academia going to hell. Every institution is
| morphing into a centralized monolith designed to exploit the
| researchers.
|
| Is there a way to stop this? Some bright minds have been able to
| support themselves through fan donations or start businesses. Too
| bad that doesn't scale.
| cosmiccatnap wrote:
| ebiester wrote:
| It will always be an uphill climb the further down on the hill
| you are. However, Academia doesn't need to keep making the hill
| taller.
|
| The hardest part is those at the top have the most advantages.
| For example, ivy league institutes now pay for substantial
| editing before it makes it to the peer review stage. This
| increases the quality of the work, but other scholars at
| institutes without the same level of funding are now competing
| against a higher bar, reducing their total output. (If you can
| save 200 hours of work per paper, you can put another paper out.)
|
| Money always imbalances the equation. This is yet another
| example. Unless institutions are willing to change the
| publication system, it will not get better, and it isn't in the
| interests in the institutions at the top to allow more
| competition.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > If you can save 200 hours of work per paper, you can put
| another paper out.
|
| I guess that's an opportunity for those countries to focus on
| research quality instead of publication volume and sidetrack
| the entire issue.
|
| But, well, they are not doing this. That's too bad.
| bee_rider wrote:
| This could be nice, as long as universities correspondingly
| stopped using paper counts as a measure of researcher
| productivity when doing hiring or tenure decisions.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Universities only use those metrics in lieu of actual
| proven results.
|
| A genius with demonstrated novel, reproducible,
| experimental results in any of the hard sciences or
| engineering will likely not encounter much difficulty
| getting a tenure track position at even the most selective
| schools.
|
| The really interesting question is why do so few
| researchers have novel, reproducible, experimental results?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Not only university hiring, but grant analysis also needs
| to change. This is something done top-down, not bottom-up.
| I guess that's why nobody is doing it.
| zucker42 wrote:
| > This increases the quality of the work, but other scholars at
| institutes without the same level of funding are now competing
| against a higher bar, reducing their total output.
|
| Reducing output in exchange for quality doesn't sound like a
| particularly bad tradeoff, especially it's happening fairly
| naturally and as a response to a perceived lack of quality.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| It doesn't sound natural at all for a wealthy institution to
| use money to hide fundamental weaknesses of its
| researchers(namely the ability to articulate their own
| research to their peers) when a less wealthy institution
| cannot afford to do so.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| If you look at it as the university itself generating the
| research output (university labs, editors, and other
| resources), then much more natural. It makes sense that a
| university with more money would be able to produce more
| research.
| zucker42 wrote:
| Yeah, that's the way the commenter I responded to wants me
| to view it, but I'm skeptical of that way of looking at it.
| I view it as specialization, where two people each
| utilizing their strengths can accomplish more together than
| they would by simply aggregating their separate products.
| Why would I demand that someone who excels at research must
| necessarily be a fantastic writer, and why would I exclude
| a person who can make meaningful contributions to human
| knowledge but nonetheless needs help communicating? If
| results are freely shared (which is why open-access is so
| important!) science is not a competition because "less
| wealthy" and "wealthy" institutions but rather a
| collaborative process working toward shared goals.
| [deleted]
| mangecoeur wrote:
| The deep irony of this being published at nature.com, who charge
| over 10000usd in article fees.
| cnees wrote:
| It's always sadly amusing when traditional publishers
| distribute pieces about flaws in open access publishing,
| preprints, SciHub, and other attempts to un-entrench them.
| pfortuny wrote:
| No wonder. It deters my colleagues in Spain (in my research
| area)... (Mathematics). I am sure those prices are way above
| anything imaginable in poorer countries.
| sgfgross wrote:
| Here's the paper: https://oa.mg/work/10.1038%2Fd41586-022-00342-w
| setgree wrote:
| The way that scientific publishing has evolved into a cartel-
| based business with insane barriers to entry has a lot of
| parallels to the healthcare industry in the US. The core problem
| with both is a disconnect between users and payers -- in this
| case, readers vs. libraries.
|
| What makes the whole situation bearable, in my opinion, is sci-
| hub. Nature or whoever can charge whatever prices they wish, it
| makes no difference to my point of access. Even during times when
| I have legitimate access, it's _still_ often simpler to just find
| a paper on sci-hub.
|
| Thank goodness for pirates.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Towards the end of writing my Master's thesis, more often than
| not, I would go through sci-hub to get papers, the simple
| reason being that even _if_ my university had paid for access
| to that specific journal, I 'd have to jump through hoops to
| get it.
|
| 5-10 minutes jumping through hoops versus 30 seconds getting it
| on sci-hub. Easy choice.
| benmccann wrote:
| Can you describe the process for getting access through your
| university? I'm curious what that experience is like
| maccard wrote:
| Either you need to log in 5o your universities bespoke
| portal that aggregates your providers, or you need to do
| some weird third party registration, and navigate a bunch
| of login flows on the slowest websites in eternity. Closest
| comparison is imagine you want to a watch a show on your
| laptop but you don't know if it's on netflix, prime or
| Disney.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Usually it is as simple as being connected through eduroam
| (the university wifi) or VPNing into the university
| network. Sometimes you have to log in to the university
| library portal and get it through there. Some journals want
| you to create accounts to access, and don't let you
| download, only read in the webviewer (without highlights or
| annotations of course).
| csunbird wrote:
| My university would ask me to proxy my internet over
| their proxy servers to reach the papers legally, when I
| am not in the campus. It was such a painful process for
| non computer science students, as they would not
| understand how to make this work.
| thayne wrote:
| It's not like journals didn't charge publishing fees before. It
| always confused me why journals could get away with charging
| publishers to publish, then charge readers (or at least libraries
| and universities) for subscriptions.
| bombcar wrote:
| I assume it evolved from charging publishers for typesetting
| and editorial work, etc, and charging readers for the physical
| copies.
| nefitty wrote:
| Here's my tiny attempt at helping:
| https://observablehq.com/@iz/sci-hub
|
| It checks for working mirrors. I included an iphone shortcut I
| made that also checks mirrors. Run the shortcut through the share
| sheet while on a page of an article you need. Feel free to ask
| for help if that's unclear.
| NmAmDa wrote:
| I think you need to be careful and write that some mirrors
| aren't official and they put their own bitcoin wallet address
| in donation site.
|
| but thank you for the help
| nefitty wrote:
| Perfect. Thank you!
| NmAmDa wrote:
| Also the shortcut is using an unknown app which doesn't show up
| when I click show in appstore.
| nefitty wrote:
| I replaced the Open in Chrome step with Open in Safari. That
| should use the default browser either way, which I was unsure
| of when I created it.
|
| Does that help?
| NmAmDa wrote:
| Now it works perfectly. Thank you for that shortcut
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