[HN Gopher] EU ready to back immediate open access without autho...
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EU ready to back immediate open access without author fees
Author : daenney
Score : 39 points
Date : 2023-05-06 20:26 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.researchprofessionalnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.researchprofessionalnews.com)
| alexfromapex wrote:
| This is amazing. Some types of industries should not operate
| under capitalism and research is probably one of those
| industries, at least for life-saving research.
| tomohelix wrote:
| To this day, I still do not understand what can be a reasonable
| cause for a paper to cost >$50 just to read it. Besides greed of
| course. Editors review paper for free, authors pay to get paper
| published, taxpayers fund the research. What do the journal's
| staff actually do that worth that kind of money?
|
| All those "publisher" middlemen can go eat dirt and I would be
| happy to shovel more dirt on them until they are 6 feet under.
| They do no work, take all the profit, and obstruct research and
| the spread of knowledge. Those are some of the worst scums of
| capitalism.
| contravariant wrote:
| Frankly I dislike the situation as well but I like to play
| devil's advocate for a bit.
|
| In some sense attaching a high cost to a paper is a crude way
| of proving the quality of the paper. Putting all of the cost
| with the authors is clearly not ideal, because you'd only
| measure how much someone is willing to pay to get it published.
| By placing the cost with the people reading the article you
| ensure that the publisher must ensure their articles are
| actually worth reading.
|
| The fact that getting incentives to align requires a random
| party to get large profits without actually doing much is a
| quirk of capitalism. If you ignore the concept of private
| property for a bit you'll see that the obvious solution is to
| simply burn up the excess money (capitalists would attempt to
| sustain the illusion that money is indelible and privately
| owned by viewing this as a tax).
| stefan_ wrote:
| That's not playing devil's advocate, that is playing
| clueless. It's the institutions paying for paper access, and
| not on a "per paper" basis; no ones incentives are being
| aligned, no one is actually paying $50 to read a paper.
| contravariant wrote:
| If (as I claimed) it's just a token cost, I don't think it
| matters much who is paying it. In fact it is almost better
| if they get to claim universities find it worth an
| expensive subscription, it's not like they're trying to
| cover costs they're putting up a barrier to show it is
| worth the trouble.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Cost =/= quality on papers, almost all of the "best writings
| of all time" are public domain, and many of the best papers
| absolutely free.
|
| And most researchers _want_ their papers to be free, to the
| point where you can email them and they will give you a free
| copy, and they post the preprints on arXiv and their personal
| website to get around publishing requirements.
| contravariant wrote:
| The journals aren't there to help spread their content
| they're there to give the content a seal of authenticity.
| As long as they can show researchers/universities are
| willing to pay high fees they can claim that their contents
| must be worth that much.
|
| Having free copies of the papers available doesn't actually
| hurt them much, provided they're still the source for
| 'authentic' copies.
|
| (sidenote: not sure what field you're talking about where
| the best writings of all time are public domain but I've
| had to pluck quite a few famous papers of scihub instead)
| cpncrunch wrote:
| Which editors, precisely, work for free?
|
| Elsevier's margin is 19%, which doesn't sound like "the worst
| scums of capitalism".
|
| If you believe you can do it cheaper, with better quality
| (because peer review kinda sucks even for top journals), by all
| means go ahead. I would love that to happen. But, as you can
| probably guess, I'm kinda skeptical.
| goosedragons wrote:
| The academic editors. And the peer reviewers (who basically
| edit too).
| cpncrunch wrote:
| Yes, peer reviewers tend to work for free. Can you give an
| example of an editor who works for free? I asked in the
| parent comment, but nobody has provided any examples
| (although they have downvoted it, oddly). I'm not aware of
| any editors who work for free for top tier journals.
|
| https://www.glassdoor.ca/Salary/Elsevier-Editor-
| Salaries-E23...
| _Wintermute wrote:
| Elsevier's profit margin is 37% from what I can find.
| cpncrunch wrote:
| https://www.google.com/finance/quote/REN:AMS
|
| "Net profit margin: 19.04"
| tomohelix wrote:
| A quick google search quickly shows you are either uninformed
| or lying. Elsevier margin is at least 37% in 2018 and its
| profit has increased in 2022.
|
| https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-
| Group/documents/pr...
|
| Most journal reviewers and editors are academics who do the
| work as public service, i.e. free. Even top spots like editor
| in chief only get an honorarium of maybe 10k a year.
| Considering these people are the top of their field and can
| easily command 6-7 figures salary at minimum, that amount is
| nothing. Only very few journals have full time editors and
| even those end up relying on the volunteers to vet and review
| articles.
|
| A full time professor is expected to be an editor for some
| journals. And these academics make up the bulk of "journal
| editors". But they would not list it as their jobs. I suspect
| that is why if you look for "editor jobs" you will get
| lobsided salary ranges that doesn't reflect reality.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > They do no work, take all the profit, and obstruct research
| and the spread of knowledge. Those are some of the worst scums
| of capitalism.
|
| People like naking comparison to natural selection, hierarchies
| and food chains.
|
| However they mistakenly believe that Lion is at the top of the
| food chain. Then they start discussing irrelevant issues, like
| if lion is being too mean to the herbivores.
|
| Their understanding is fundamentally wrong - the lion is not at
| the top. The parasites that live in the lion are at the top.
|
| The punlishers are parasites. They are at the top.
|
| How does nature remove parasites, say tapeworms? It doesn't,
| only extenral intervention like surgery can remove them.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > How does nature remove parasites, say tapeworms? It
| doesn't, only extenral intervention like surgery can remove
| them.
|
| Presumably there is an evolutionary arms race going on
| between host and parasite.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| To make them disappear you may remove their habitat and food
| : the lions. Or as the author propose : the publishers.
| bandika wrote:
| It's not just that. I had only two articles published in well
| known journals, but in both cases the reviewers main criticism
| was that I didn't cite the reviewer's own article. It's an
| utterly corrupt system, something you learn to live with it
| when you decide to choose academic life.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Scientific publishers have high profit margins, but the prices
| are still within the right order of magnitude. Most research
| papers have a very narrow target audience. Publishers do a
| nontrivial amount of typesetting and administrative work for
| each paper, and that must be covered by a small number of
| downloads.
| sylware wrote:
| [flagged]
| s1k3s wrote:
| Since there are some comments that seem to misunderstand it
| (clickbait title also btw), this is about "papers reporting
| publicly funded research".
| neets wrote:
| Better to ask forgiveness than ask permission, eh Facebook
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