Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984
Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research
HERE is a trivia question for you: what is the most profitable business in the world? You might think oil, or maybe banking. You would be wrong. The answer is academic publishing. Its profit margins are vast, reportedly in the region of 40 per cent.
The reason it is so lucrative is because most of the costs of its content is picked up by taxpayers. Publicly funded researchers do the work, write it up and judge its merits. And yet the resulting intellectual property ends up in the hands of the publishers. To rub salt into the wound they then sell it via exorbitant subscriptions and paywalls, often paid for by taxpayers too.
[...] The latest attempt to break the mould is called Plan S, created by umbrella group cOAlition S. It demands that all publicly funded research be made freely available (see "An audacious new plan will make all science free. Can it work?"). When Plan S was unveiled in September, its backers expected support to snowball. But only a minority of Europe's 43 research funding bodies have signed up, and hoped-for participation from the US has failed to materialise. Meanwhile, a grass-roots campaign against it is gathering momentum.
(Score: 4, Informative) by PiMuNu on Monday November 26 2018, @12:27PM
Just for those who don't know, the current model is that:
* Researchers push their paper to arxiv or equivalent. This is okay as researcher still owns the copyright.
* Researchers then push their paper to journal.
The unfortunate thing is that the journal paper gets cited, not the arxiv paper. It is not too bad to look for the equivalent paper on arxiv, by doing e,g, year/title/author searches through DuckDuckGo, but it is non-ideal and paper scraping engines like ResearchGate or Harvard abstract database don't index the arxiv papers sometimes.
Nonetheless, it does work around most of the "closed source" issues.