SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 26 2018, @01:34PM
As a researcher, two more things:
1. Price of publishing in OA journals is usually high enough to eat funds dedicated to e.g. conference. This is quite large problem in some universities, if they have to choose between visibility in conferences and in journals.
2. Title piracy. Seriously, I have no idea about other name for this kind of actions. Generally, every few months there are some "lists of bad journals" going around universities, some of them are sponsored by one publisher, some by another, some seem to be more or less neutral. Generally, authors of such lists don't want to be detected here and lists are mostly published on free hostings, without any information about who did these lists, and if there is a short bio of some professor, it's impossible to find/contact the author of the list. My crappy hobby website is on the hosting paid around 25USD per year with domain and I can put hundreds of such lists there, as well as most universities have free hosting platforms for such kind of stuff for employees... and the author chooses free hosting? Young researchers usually don't get manipulated, but old ones do it permanently.