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posted by takyon on Monday November 26 2018, @02:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the marginalized dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday November 26 2018, @08:50PM (3 children)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday November 26 2018, @08:50PM (#766594) Journal

    So how many people have the ability to make three million dollars a year, and at the same time do full-time research?

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 26 2018, @08:57PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 26 2018, @08:57PM (#766598)

    Very few, it is a luxury. But that isnt the real point, the real point is to purge the careerists every few generations so academia can be refreshed with people who would do this stuff as a hobby (if wealthy enough).

    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday November 27 2018, @06:20AM (1 child)

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Tuesday November 27 2018, @06:20AM (#766835) Journal

      But that isnt the real point, the real point is to purge the careerists every few generations so academia can be refreshed with people who would do this stuff as a hobby (if wealthy enough).

      And how, exactly, is that point made in the sentence “Get out, make money, fund your own research.” which this whole subthread was about?

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 27 2018, @01:34PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 27 2018, @01:34PM (#766912)

        Because that is the only opportunity to do science left when the careerists are suffocating out all the people who want to do science from funding.