from the stand-on-the-shoulders-of-giants dept.
A new mandate highlights costs, benefits of making all scientific articles free to read:
In 2018, a group of mostly European funders sent shock waves through the world of scientific publishing by proposing an unprecedented rule: The scientists they funded would be required to make journal articles developed with their support immediately free to read when published.
The new requirement, which takes effect starting this month, seeks to upend decades of tradition in scientific publishing, whereby scientists publish their research in journals for free and publishers make money by charging universities and other institutions for subscriptions. Advocates of the new scheme, called Plan S (the “S” stands for the intended “shock” to the status quo), hope to destroy subscription paywalls and speed scientific progress by allowing findings to be shared more freely. It’s part of a larger shift in scientific communication that began more than 20 years ago and has recently picked up steam.
Scientists have several ways to comply with Plan S, including by paying publishers a fee to make an article freely available on a journal website, or depositing the article in a free public repository where anyone can download it. The mandate is the first by an international coalition of funders, which now includes 17 agencies and six foundations, including the Wellcome Trust and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, two of the world’s largest funders of biomedical research.
[...] Other recent developments point to growing support for open access. In 2017, for the first time, the majority of new papers across all scholarly disciplines, most of them in the sciences, were published open access, according to the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative. More recently, most major publishers removed paywalls from articles about COVID-19 last year in an attempt to speed development of vaccines and treatments.
Despite these and other signs of momentum, some publishing specialists say Plan S and other open-access measures could be financially stressful and ultimately unsustainable for publishers and the research institutions and authors who foot the bill.
Journal References:
1.) Nina Schönfelder. Article processing charges: Mirroring the citation impact or legacy of the subscription-based model? [open], Quantitative Science Studies (DOI: qss_a_00015)
2.) Anthony J. Olejniczak, Molly J. Wilson. Who’s writing open access (OA) articles? Characteristics of OA authors at Ph.D.-granting institutions in the United States [open], Quantitative Science Studies (DOI: qss_a_00091)
Related Stories
Science journals to offer select authors open-access publishing for free:
AAAS[*], which publishes the Science family of journals, announced today it will offer its authors a free way to comply with a mandate issued by some funders that publications resulting from research they fund be immediately free to read. Under the new open-access policy, authors may deposit near-final, peer-reviewed versions of papers accepted by paywalled Science titles in publicly accessible online repositories.
For now, Science's approach, known as green open access, will only apply to authors of papers funded by Coalition S, a group of mostly European funders and foundations behind an open-access mandate that takes effect this month. The funders say immediate access will accelerate scientific discovery by disseminating new findings faster. Up to 31% of research papers in the flagship journal Science and four other Science titles have cited funding from Coalition S, said Bill Moran, the journals' publisher. Until now, these papers had been available immediately only to journal subscribers, although the paywalled Science journals do make all papers free 12 months after publication.
Articles made public under the new policy will carry an open-access license, and authors will retain copyright, another of Coalition S's conditions.
AAAS said it will pilot the new policy for 1 year, allowing it to judge whether the policy causes revenues to suffer.
[*] AAAS: American Association for the Advancement of Science
Also at: Nature
Previously: A New Mandate Highlights Costs, Benefits of Making All Scientific Articles Free to Read
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 02 2021, @01:58PM (45 children)
It depends if it's good or bad. Most universities had already subscriptions to these publications. So the only people that didn't have access would be non-research domains or private sector or whatever. But even in these cases, you could get access via local university library.
The good of the old model is that it was free to public things. The bad of the open access is that it costs money to publish things.
In the old model, if you were independent, you would have to get access to journals at the library. But with online access, this "inconvenience" doesn't really exist anymore. So now if you want to publish your results as independent, you have to pay. So, if anything, open access made it more difficult for an *organized* person to have access to these journals (ie. publish and read). For the layman (or anyone not in the field), it doesn't matter, since they don't understand most of what's in them anyway.
So Open Access is mostly meh. Someone pays, but now it's the contributor not the user.
Maybe it's good for the poorer institutions in the 3rd world that can't afford the fees in the first place?
OA has been good at the scamming journals though.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 02 2021, @02:35PM (29 children)
So, we should hold research back like it's 1995 indefinitely?
In 1990 when I wanted access to a referenced journal article, I would often drive from my University 100 miles up the coast to a neighboring University that kept a somewhat complimentary selection of journals on hand, or - put in for in for an intra-library loan which would be grumpily delivered in a week, or three.
Is research material only for academics? Are you implying corporations should pay high fees for access to academic journals? (Maybe they should provide some form of support, though I would prefer they simply paid taxes instead and the academics could be funded from that.) Is there value in keeping academic publications out of the view of common WebMD trolls?
Overall, I believe TIATA: Transparency Is Always The Answer. Research should be freely accessible, with as little barrier to access as possible. The only thing that we need to work on restoring to 1995 levels is the attention span of the readers.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by Original on Saturday January 02 2021, @02:41PM (22 children)
Except you are not starting and maintaining an open access journal. So you're oblivious to the costs. Someone has to pay.
It's easy to say make the government pay, but who decides how much should govt pay and to which specific journals?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday January 02 2021, @02:50PM (4 children)
Funding? Taxpayer funded research is taxpayer funded. Maybe it should be accessible? Tell me again why taxpayer funded research is published in privately held for-profit jounals.
Something has to change.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Saturday January 02 2021, @04:31PM (2 children)
You're not arguing the same argument.
"starting and maintaining an open access journal"
cool. it should be accessible. that is not the responsibility of a private organization. that is the responsibility of the taxpayer and people they elect.
it is published in private journals because you're free to publish anywhere you want. I agree with you that the taxpayer should include in those funds we give away, a mechanism for a public journal, and the researcher should be forced to publish in it. in addition to where ever else they want to, like a private journal. but this is a completely different argument.
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 03 2021, @04:14AM (1 child)
From https://cdreimer.com/ktbb/2017/06/20/the-confessions-of-slashdot-asshats/ [cdreimer.com]
Several weeks ago I wrote about using the DMCA takedown notices to remove my picture from image websites [soylentnews.org] that Slashdot asshats kept posting for shakes and giggles. What I didn’t mention then was that three users accounts — “criemer,” “creinner” and “cremier,” variations of my Slashdot username — got deleted by management, and I subsequently created new accounts with disposable email addresses to prevent the usernames from being reused. End of story, right? Not quite. An extraordinary set of events shortly thereafter caused another user account to get deleted by management that immediately ended three months of unrelenting harassment towards me.
Confession
After I announced in a comment that I’ve successfully taken down all my pictures from various image websites, two users, an Anonymous Coward (or asshat) and “FakeFuck39” (seriously), commented that they “found” more of my pictures in a search result that I failed to notice and provided a new set of image links. What was curious was the very first link had a posted timestamp of 15 minutes earlier. All the links were recently posted. While I copy and pasted a new round of DMCA takedown notices to email, “FakeFuck39” posted a confession about the three deleted user accounts [slashdot.org].
An asshat confessed [slashdot.org] to being “cdreimer,” the user account that started this series of events [soylentnews.org] at the beginning of the Memorial Day holiday weekend.
I sent an email to my contact at Slashdot the next morning, pointing out the links to newly uploaded pictures and nostalgic confessions.
Escalation
Later that evening I got a comment posted by an asshat [slashdot.org] written in the same style as “FakeFuck39”:
I sent an email to my contact at Slashdot and went to bed.
“FakeFuck39” commented the next morning [slashdot.org] with newly uploaded picture links. This was where everything tied together. An asshat promised Photoshoped pictures and “FakeFuck39” delivered the links to the Photoshoped pictures. Could we say that the two were the same person?
Deletion
I sent off another email to my contact at Slashdot the next morning. After lunch I got an email from management that “FakeFuck39” would join the other deleted user accounts. I periodically checked throughout the day to see if the account got deleted. When the “FakeFuck39” username became available again, I created a new account to the prevent from the username from being reclaimed by its former user. Unlike the other fake user accounts that got deleted, “FakeFuck39” had two years of comment history and the last three months focused on replying to my comments. The harassment that got started when someone falsely accused me of threatening to shoot them [soylentnews.org] finally came to an abrupt end.
The asshats, of course, never went away on Slashdot. A dedicated group of Beavis and Butthead types are still replying to my comments for the last two weeks. They’re easy to ignore.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 03 2021, @04:25AM
I beg all soylentils to mod THE fat fucker down please
Also, read below why he always talk about Stan Lee.
Hey there, people, I'm creimy brown
They say I'm the cutest boy in town
My car is fast, my teeth is shiney
I tell all the girls they can kiss my heinie
Here I am at a famous school
I'm dressin sharp n I'm
Actin cool
I got a cheerleader here wants to help with my paper
Let her do all the work n maybe later I'll rape her
Oh God I am the american cream
I do not think I'm too extreme
An I'm a handsome sonofabitch
I'm gonna get a good job n be real rich
(get a good
Get a good
Get a good
Get a good job)
Womens liberation
Came creepin across the nation
I tell you people I was not ready
When I fucked this dyke by the name of stanlee
She made a little speech then,
Aw, she tried to make me say when
She had my balls in a vice, but she left the dick
I guess it's still hooked on, but now it shoots too quick
Oh God I am the american cream
But now I smell like vaseline
An I'm a miserable sonofabitch
Am I a boy or a lady... I don't know which
(I wonder wonder
Wonder wonder)
So I went out n bought me a leisure suit
I jingle my change, but I'm still kinda cute
Got a job doin radio promo
An none of the jocks can even tell I'm a homo
Eventually me n a friend
Sorta drifted along into s&m
I can take about an hour on the tower of power
Long as I gets a little golden shower
Oh God I am the american cream
With a spindle up my butt till it makes me scream
An I'll do anything to get ahead
I lay awake nights sayin, thank you, stan!
Oh god, oh god, I'm so fantastic!
Thanks to stanlee, I'm a sexual spastic
And my name is creimy brown
Watch me now, I'm goin down,
And my name is creimy brown
Watch me now, I'm goin down, etc.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday January 02 2021, @05:11PM
Look at what happened when movie archives burned to the ground because of unstable celluloid movie stock. Or more recently, the original tapes of music. If copyright were limited to the original term, many of those original recordings would be on hard drives all over the world.
Same with tons of video games. TV shows. Older versions of operating systems and the programs that ran on them.
You're upset that the record company you sold your rights to lost the master tapes? Blame copyright law. Those master tapes would be all over the world if copyright had expired on them.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 02 2021, @02:59PM (2 children)
Are you, too, living in 1995?
What are the costs for providing open access to journal articles online? Let's neglect lawyers whose function it is to pontificate about copyright issues.
Are peer reviewers paid? Are authors paid? Not in the journals I worked with. It costs $25M per year to run Wikipedia - I think we can find that kind of money somewhere in the global economy to support the free publication of academic research: 0.0035 USD per year per person.
Users of paper copies can pay for the paper publication costs.
The open question is: editorial staff, where does their pay come from? Seems like JAMA and similar should be able to secure grants sufficient to fund legitimate editorial functions. They won't likely be rolling in posh travel budgets and out-sized salaries anymore, but it's not 1995 anymore either, is it?
I think a better model for journal editorial function would be a part-time responsibility of a coalition of academics from diverse universities, as an unpaid part of their job posting. Publish or perish, then become a peer reviewer - spend long enough as a peer reviewer and you become eligible for the post of credited editor, and a journal's reputation should be judged heavily on the reputations of its editors.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 02 2021, @04:10PM
"The open question is: editorial staff, where does their pay come from?"
and how much should each staff member be paid exactly (ie: annually) and how many staff members do we need per journal and why?
Let's break these costs down more specifically.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 03 2021, @09:09AM
> It costs $25M per year to run Wikipedia - I think we can find that kind of money somewhere in the global economy to support the free publication of academic research: 0.0035 USD per year per person.
Even better: cut military funding a bit instead. Two birds – one stone.
(Score: 3, Informative) by loonycyborg on Saturday January 02 2021, @03:15PM (2 children)
Pay to who and for what exactly? Current journals tax universities all over the world and only value they provide back are printed journals themselves. They operate at insane margins and don't even share money with peer-reviewers. So IMO they're not entitled to restrict digital copies of any scientific data such as articles, especially for research that was tax funded.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 02 2021, @04:18PM
I feel like the universities themselves should just host their own journals and share and work with other universities to peer review each other's work. Cut out the publishers and get together and create their own publications and they can host jointly.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Tokolosh on Saturday January 02 2021, @04:50PM
We are paying dead tree money for AWS cost. DTM/AWS = a ridiculous margin. It's time for disruption and disintermediation.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Immerman on Saturday January 02 2021, @04:28PM (3 children)
>Someone has to pay.
For what? You sound like you're claiming some inside information.
I mean, the traditional costs of publishing are:
Paying the author - scientific journals don't do that
Paying the reviewers - scientific journals don't do that
Paying for printing - modern online journals don't have do that either
Paying the editors - okay, might still need some of that
So what's left? Running a website? Not free, but doesn't require anything like the massive revenue streams popular scientific journals have at their disposal.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday January 02 2021, @05:18PM (1 child)
Maybe it could be justified when you actually had to print and mail journals. Those days are long gone.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday January 02 2021, @09:08PM
Yeah, and yet somehow the journals are shameless enough to demand that the authors not freely share their papers on their own websites. Try providing a legitimate justification for THAT bit of bs. But journals have enormous leverage over researcher's careers, so they get to make the rules.
As I understand it, editors usually don't concern themselves with accuracy of content. More, spelling, grammar, and possibly page layout, etc - or do they still call that typesetting? If it's a physical journal, someone has to actually lay everything out. And even online it'll need some formatting, indexing, etc. to fit neatly in the larger organizational layout.
Especially not for scientific journals where an editor will almost certainly be vastly less knowledgeable on the topic than the author. That's why (reputable) journals send papers to a few of the authors peers for review - they're almost certainly less knowlegable on the specific topic than the author as well (or there wouldn't be much point in publishing), but at least they're (hopefully) well versed in the field and can spot obvious logical or procedural flaws.
NOTHING can spot fraudulent results though - not unless other people have already done the same experiments, in which case in the current academic atmosphere there wouldn't be much point in publishing. To spot flaws in the results you need other researchers to attempt to repeat the experiment. A.k.a. peer review. And you have to get published before that can happen, so that the peers that might be interesting in attempting to repeat your results have a just to actually hear about them.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 03 2021, @03:11AM
How about the Universities, instead of paying for journal access, provide the editorial staff for free.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Saturday January 02 2021, @08:09PM (2 children)
No, they don't. This is a lie. It is false, untrue, and really, really stupid. What has to be paid for? Papers are written by researchers, who have positions. Authorship is free. Peer-review is done, by, wait for it! Peers!! Again, they have positions, unpaid. Editing? Have you actually read any recent academic articles? Introducing typos and losing fragments of sentences? No cost! Finally, typesetting and paper and binding costs? Shipping and storage, insect control? None of those exist any longer, and Universities and other Higher Education institutions have servers, already.
Academic publishers, like textbook publishers, used to serve an actual purpose. But now they have become gatekeepers seeking rents. The "charges" for Open Access" journals are more often than not a scam, preying on desperate young scholars who need things to put into their Vita Curriculum. There are conference scammers that do the same. What is valuable, as with Universities themselves, is not the product, but the reputation.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday January 03 2021, @10:16PM (1 child)
Perhaps we're asking the wrong question. Instead of "What are the journals doing that's worth paying for", we should be asking "How can we best deliver the value that Journals used to offer?"
And what was that value? I would say curating knowledge. Gathering together the gems of research from throughout the academic world, and sharing it with those whose who might offer valuable insights, or find valuable applications for it within their own projects.
I would say that curation is still valuable - but the challenge has become sifting through a mass of research for the gems - the sheer volume of research to consider has grown astronomically, and increasing specialization means that much new knowledge is primarily of interest to a relative few people.
Perhaps, the "journal" of the future might be look more like an academic social media site than a magazine. Acting to connect new research to those scattered people who it might be of interest to. Maybe let scientists lend some of their "reputation points" to bolster each other's research. Help the gems quickly bubble up from obscurity through to wider exposure, and quickly disseminate new insights from the academic titans.
I think there's value there well worth paying for, and lots of necessary development and maintenance costs that need to be paid. Perhaps it could be covered by individual membership fees. Or... given the audience, a smart ad-targetting engine that could connect reseachers with the equipment and services they didn't realize they needed could be extremely lucrative for everyone. It might even use the "get knowledge to the right people" algorithms organizing the site as a powerful starting point.
Hmm, as much as I hate "pay to play"...perhaps that could be a wonderful way to provide both access to everyone, and incentive to pay for it. Don't pay for an academic membership, and you still get profiled and targeted for papers and ads of interest, but you have to rely entirely on reputation borrowed from your colleagues to draw attention to your own research.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 03 2021, @10:38PM
I think part of the issue is that .... in order to get a Ph.D. it is highly encouraged/recommended (perhaps not strictly required but might as well be?) that you publish to a journal that's considered reputable. So, as others have stated, this gives the 'reputable' journals leverage.
Maybe it's this model that needs to change.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 02 2021, @10:54PM (2 children)
I find it somewhat funny how many people are arguing that no one has to be paid for anything apparently "who and what?" on a website that repeatedly begs for money and has its current fundraising drive prominently displayed on the front page continuously.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 03 2021, @12:59AM
That sounds like a strawman. I don't think anyone is arguing that no one needs to be paid for anything.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday January 03 2021, @09:27AM
While our running costs are significant to our own community, they would be the equivalent to the small change that one finds down the back of a sofa for a university to pay out.
Furthermore, the universities already have servers and a significant on-line presence which would easily cope with the additional 'burden' of scientific journals. They only need to host the journals produced by their own researchers, other universities can host their own. Old technology such as RSS makes the job of combining each source trivial.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday January 03 2021, @03:40AM
There are some organisations that just post their publications on github.
Those interested just clone the repository.
Thus copies can be around as long as there is interest in them.
-- hendrik
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 02 2021, @05:01PM (2 children)
These days we have the "Internet" which makes this a moot point. I can access the University's library journal section from any place in the world. All I have to do is login with my library credentials. It costs about $150/year from my university to have this access, including their entire book catalogue. Whether $150/yr makes sense for everyone is questionable, but it certainly is if you make use if this resource.
The question is who pays for the journal to exist. The reader or the researcher. With Open Access, the researcher pays. So industry sponsored things are obviously going to be published. But what about things like negative results? Would researcher pay $2k to publish a negative result?
Naivete would say that transparency is always the answer. But as you have already alluded to, the more information is available, the less of it is actually visible.
In 1995 you had layman magazines that would distill the research papers to the ordinary curious individual. Magazines like Scientific American, Sky & Telescope, and even National Geographic. You see, the journals are NOT meant for layman in the first place. They are communication to the scientific (and also engineering) community. They represent some kind of body of work, some finding, but by themselves are not "truth". These are meant to be useful in a quest for more knowledge. They are not meant to be a basis of knowledge. The journals are the bleeding edge, the fried fringe, not the solid foundation of knowledge.. Basically, journals are what a verse in a Bible is - it can be taken completely out of context. That's why people end up confused, give up and say "there is a study that will contradict another study". Having more access to journals doesn't solve this problem at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_journals_by_preprint_policy [wikipedia.org]
And look here, most journals allow pre-print publications. So the idea that they are censored is kind of moot.
Myself, I was optimistic about the entire Open Access journals, but in reality, who has time to read them in the first place unless that's part of your job? And in the end, they don't solve the problem they were deemed to solve in the first place.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 02 2021, @08:16PM
"Magazines like Scientific American, Sky & Telescope, and even National Geographic."
It's insulting to think that we should go back to the days where the most sophisticated information freely available to the general public is this. Why not throw Bill Nye the science guy in there too ;) Or the mainstream media like CNN. In fact I would say one of the biggest problems we have is that the mainstream media is full of non-technical journalists. The people running companies tend to be executive types while they have the engineers and scientists advising them. No, the journalists themselves should have science degrees. Politicians (like the Angela Merkel) should have science degrees. We should try to encourage the general public to know more.
A curious individual should have free access to all the technical information in existence. The idea that education and access to information should cost a fortune is not something I agree with.
"Naivete would say that transparency is always the answer."
It is the answer. The idea that information gatekeepers are somehow better than me at determining what I should have free access to is silly. Like the gatekeepers, or yourself, are special. You're not.
"but by themselves are not "truth""
Something doesn't have to be absolute truth to spark interest. Even art isn't 'truth' yet people can be interested in that.
"Having more access to journals doesn't solve this problem at all."
Having more access to information lets people understand the issue better. It lets them better distinguish what's established and what still needs to be researched and why instead of simply being fed what you want them to be fed. Allowing more people to see where research is still needed might get them to figure out how that research can be done (ie: find ways to fund it, where politicians should really be directing their attention and why instead of what the mainstream media wants them to think). It might help spark interests in a given subject.
"they don't solve the problem they were deemed to solve in the first place."
I would disagree.
"Indeed, a 2008 study revealed that mental health professionals are roughly twice as likely to read a relevant article if it is freely available."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access [wikipedia.org]
They may not accomplish what you personally want them to accomplish but if people read the articles then, IMO, that's a good accomplishment right there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 02 2021, @11:23PM
"That's why people end up confused, give up and say "there is a study that will contradict another study"."
Heaven forbid someone 'gives up' and draws a conclusion other than the conclusion you want them to draw. That would be such a tragedy. Better to tell people what to think than to give them the necessary information they need to think for themselves.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday January 04 2021, @08:07AM (2 children)
When asked for comment, they said that, as far as we can see, looking at it by and large, taking one thing with another in terms of the average of departments, then in the final analysis it is probably true to say, that at the end of the day, in general terms, you would probably find that, not to put too fine a point on it, there probably wasn't very much in it one way or the other as far as one can see, at this stage.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 04 2021, @01:34PM (1 child)
Yeah, translates to: decision makers just got a fat donation from the benefactors of the status quo.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 04 2021, @01:37PM
benefactorsbeneficiaries🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by Original on Saturday January 02 2021, @02:37PM
I don't see much difference between pay-to-publish in openaccess journal and pay-to-publish a magazine ad. For both, the publisher's incentive is to maximize revenue, not encourage science.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday January 02 2021, @02:47PM (6 children)
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday January 02 2021, @02:48PM (3 children)
Arrrrgh! Improperly closed quotations suck.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 02 2021, @09:43PM (1 child)
[[[[[[[[[[[{{{(((((((({[[{{{[{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[
You'll never close them all sucka!
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday January 03 2021, @03:42AM
I see your clever Scheme!
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 02 2021, @09:48PM
#preview-button
(Score: 3, Informative) by mhajicek on Saturday January 02 2021, @06:43PM
I've encountered the same thing. Not just with plastics but also with Nitinol, titanium alloys, and even steel alloys. Find a link that promises what you're searching for, and wham, paywall. Please pay hundreds of dollars to access this article.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 03 2021, @03:17AM
> I work in the plastic industry. ...
I work (peripherally) in the rubber industry, where there is a ~150 year history of industrial secrecy. In the early days there was the theft of rubber trees/seeds from South America to raise them in SE Asia (and elsewhere) where the native rubber gatherers were more compliant.
One rubber tire might have a dozen or two different rubber formulations in it, made from a hundred or more base chemicals. Try to find basic information on more than the most common feedstocks, good luck.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by legont on Saturday January 02 2021, @02:53PM
The best compromise is the current system where rich universities pay for subscriptions while whoever can't pay simply pirate them. The only thing needed is decriminalization of piracy.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bradley13 on Saturday January 02 2021, @03:25PM (1 child)
Um, no, it actually doesn't. The real work of a publication - what ought to be expensive - is getting reviews done by technical experts. Part of anyone's work in research is reviewing papers for free. As for finding the reviewers: anyone publishing a paper already knows (or their advisor knows) who is suited to be a reviewer. Within your research area, you know who the other experts are.
The work of the journals used to be physical publication. This is no longer necessary, nor even really desired. Schools and research institutions already run web repositories for their own publications. There are already plenty of directories (example: Google Scholar) that point to papers, and they can easily point to these repositories instead of journals.
The only function of journals that has not (yet) be entirely replaced is reputation: you would rather be published in Nature than in Joe's Wiki. At least for now - but there is no reason why Joe's Wiki cannot gain reputation. If the journals disappear, good authors and good research will naturally collect somewhere else.
tl;dr: Journals have become entirely superfluous.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by number11 on Saturday January 02 2021, @04:58PM
This. I once had a job with one of the AMA's second-string journals. I was the only paid staff on the editorial side, and that was a half-time job at university clerk's wages. It would take less time these days, since time spent copying manuscripts would approach zero. The editors were in it for prestige, and reviewers didn't get paid. The authors didn't get paid. There was some modest overhead for copying and postage. The physical production stuff was done by the AMA's staff, but a lot of their work (typesetting, layout, printing physical copies) would be trivial now. These days, with the software we have, once they've made up a template or two for the journal, it's hard to imagine a month's production (one issue of the journal) would take more than a day, after the editorial side is finished. Maybe another day or two for a professional copy editor (a trade that seems to have vanished, judging by the incompetent editing and proofreading I see all over these days). I can't imagine that journal's total costs these days would be more than $100K/year.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday January 02 2021, @03:34PM
If they already pay have money to pay for the subscription year after year, why not pay once for publishing then skip all subscriptions for access after?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Dr Ippy on Saturday January 02 2021, @06:02PM (2 children)
I was an academic in the UK for 15 years. I was also an author, a reviewer, and an IEEE associate editor. One of the papers I coauthored was the most cited in the journal. I didn't get paid for any of that work.
My interests didn't just stop dead when I left academia. But I had no access to most published papers in the field; it was a case of emailing the author and asking for a copy.
As for going to a public library, sorry, it wasn't possible. Although the university is only half an hour's drive away, I'd have to pay for parking and they wouldn't let me into the library without a card. These access cards are issued to staff and students, not hoi polloi. You can't have just anyone walking into a university library, it's not a public building! (Even though it's funded from the public purse.)
Don't assume everything is the same as in North America. It ain't.
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(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Saturday January 02 2021, @08:00PM
Can you bookmark them in PubMed [nih.gov] and then work through the list, emailing authors for the ones that don't have the full-text available on the site? Dunno if there's something similar to PubMed for UK-published papers.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday January 02 2021, @09:59PM
This! You don't hear much about the people who are marginalized. In the brutal world of "Publish or Perish", I am one of the perished. I still like to research things. But I have no university position, and so, limited access to university libraries.
I live in a major metropolitan area that has over a dozen universities. The nearest is 15 minutes away. Yes, parking is a problem. Most colleges abuse parking enforcement for purposes of increasing their revenues, and I prefer not to play that game. I can walk into their libraries, take books off the shelves and read them there. And that's about it. I can't check books out. I cannot use their "free" WiFi that is only free to students, faculty, and others connected to the school. Need login credentials that are issued only to members of the school. I can't use the computers and databases they have available, to search for publications of interest, as those systems also insist that the would-be user first log in. I can use a copier-- they still have those-- if it is coin operated. But those too might instead be set up so that you must swipe your school issued ID card to use them, so that the costs can be conveniently charged to your account with the school. It's a wonder they let strangers inside at all, the way everything else is locked down. It's like they know that physical presence no longer much matters, so why not let the marginalized chump walk in the door? Not like the poor sap can do anything, ha ha! Far better I just stay home and use my own Internet connection, instead of being physically present in the library and denied a connection.
Another thing that really stinks for me, and isn't great for anyone, is this "author pays" publishing model. What has happened there is that universities have stepped up to foot those "author pays" bills for their professors and researchers. For them, the very term "author pays" is incorrect, it'd be more accurate to say "patron pays". The term also smacks of vanity publishing. What it really is, of course, is a shakedown. The amounts that academic publishers ask are outrageous. How much? Think of how the MAFIAA computes losses, that's how much. More than 10 times as much as they could ever expect to make by paywalling the research in question.
So of course, If you are not affiliated with a university, you have no patron who has pledged to meet such expenses. If I do get published, then I still had the additional problem of how to attend the conference, if, as usual until 2020, it was a big gathering in "meat space", and it was being held in some distant city, perhaps on another continent. Travel isn't cheap.
(Score: 2) by leon_the_cat on Saturday January 02 2021, @02:07PM
I'm hoping it is!
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by fakefuck39 on Saturday January 02 2021, @02:41PM (6 children)
It takes hard cold cash to do peer reviews, put the content in a searchable database, and a bunch of other stuff. What the issue is to me is the contracts. You take your paper and you send it to these guys. They spend the cash and effort to make your paper reputable, or reject it. At that point in most contracts they now have full control of your paper and you can't just dump it online for anyone to read. That part is the problem. I'd understand a year or two for that. But not a decade, and not eternity. That part of the contract should have legal, government-enforced term limits on it, because the author didn't give up ownership of his work, and should be able to publish it to an open site. Not the reviewed/edited copy from the publisher. The literal original he submitted to them.
And if any of this used any public funding or public research, that's a different game all together. That should be open by definition, gpl3-style.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 02 2021, @06:42PM (3 children)
No, peer reviewing doesn't require cash. Reviewers generally don't get paid for their work. Editors can get stipends for their work, depending on the journal. But this could be eliminated and a lot of journals would continue to operate just fine. Editorial board membership is often mostly comprised of faculty. There are three expectations for faculty at universities that do research: teaching, research, and service. Serving on editorial boards is within the service category. This does get evaluated when faculty go up for tenure or promotion, so there's still incentive to serve on editorial boards. As for staff like copy editors, their roles are largely dependent on having papers accepted. They can be paid through page charges, which get billed once a paper is accepted for publication. Once a paper is accepted, the work of reviewers, editors, and other staff is complete. Printing costs are also a one time cost. This is a one time cost and can be covered with page charges. If editorial boards absolutely must get paid, authors could be charged a small fee to submit a paper, not unlike the abstract fee for submitting to conferences.
The recurring cost is keeping servers online to distribute papers. But this could be solved by having a central repository that's funded through donations or supported by governments. Even something like the Library of Congress could serve as exactly this type of repository. There will still be subscriptions for people who want paper copies of journals, though I'd bet that's becoming far less common. If journals are operated by professional societies, they can be supported through member dues. There are lots of creative ways to solve the one recurring cost.
When a paper is accepted for publication, you're expected to sign over your copyright to the journal, if you haven't already done so previously. Normally they grant the author limited rights, such as to use the figures in grant proposals. This is a requirement, even for journals that have an open access fee that is added to the page charges, or can optionally be added. I've never liked this because it should be sufficient just to grant a perpetual royalty-free license to the journal while the author retains copyrights. This could even have limited exclusivity, requiring that while authors can distribute the work themselves as part of compilations and textbooks, that they can't submit the paper to other journals.
The likely result is that journals will raise their fees or add open access fees to allow work to be freely available online as soon as it's published. I've published and reviewed for journals that do exactly this. Publishers will still get paid, just by making publication more expensive. When you write a funding proposal, you itemize costs in your budget, and one of the items is publication costs. That figure will just go up and funding agencies may have to pay more. Alternatively, the facilities and administration (F&A) costs in grants often in part fund university libraries that are used by researchers. If libraries don't have to subscribe to journals because they're free, the F&A costs could go down. In practice, it's unlikely that F&A costs will decrease, because this is abused by state universities to provide additional revenue as state legislatures cut back on budgets. But even if open access charges are, say, an extra $800 per paper, even for a proposal that budgets for several papers, it's a drop in the bucket compared to other expenses.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by fakefuck39 on Saturday January 02 2021, @06:55PM (2 children)
I never said reviewers get paid. I said taking something and making it peer reviewed costs money to the people in charge of that process. It costs cash to do what these private journals do.
If you want to establish a peer reviewer network, complete with staff to organize who gets requests, vet them and their background, the computer infrastructure and software those people use, the office they work in, HR, sexual harrassment lawsuits, etc - you know, running a company, things have cost. Let's say you make $100k/year salary. Surprise, you cost your company twice as much.
As can be seen by the fact that to publish your paper in an open journal, will cost you upwards of $2k, and the $800 number you give, I would say, is not very common, but is still money.
You propose a different system. Since it's almost free according to your math, you should start one. And any private journal is free to do what they want as well. So far, people seem to favor the private ones, and it is their choice what to use.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 02 2021, @09:49PM (1 child)
In the journals I've published in and reviewed for, what I'm describing is completely normal. Here are some links describing the policy for AMS journals:
https://www.ametsoc.org/ams/index.cfm/publications/authors/journal-and-bams-authors/page-charges-waivers-and-fees/ [ametsoc.org]
https://www.ametsoc.org/index.cfm/ams/publications/ethical-guidelines-and-ams-policies/open-access-for-ams-journals-and-bams/ [ametsoc.org]
AMS requires authors to pay page charges, with exceptions if they don't have funding to cover the charges. There is an optional open access fee that they recently raised from $800 to $1,100. The open access fee makes papers publicly available immediately upon publication. Otherwise, they're only available to subscribers for the first year after publication and are otherwise behind a paywall. Funding to pay the page charges generally comes from grants, so I just tell the university staff which grant to bill the page charges to, and they take care of the actual payment to the journal. AMS is a professional society, so they have other sources of funding like member dues and conference registration fees. AMS journals are some of the most influential in the field, with some journals like MWR, which dates back to 1872.
Another prestigious journal in the field is QJRMS, which is an RMS journal and is published by Wiley. Here's some information about their fee structure:
https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/hub/journal/1477870X/about/author-guidelines [wiley.com]
They also require the authors to pay for page charges, and there's a separate optional open access fee. I'm not sure how long papers remain behind a paywall for Wiley journals if authors decline the open access fee.
This a pretty standard model for publishing journals. Peer review isn't expensive at all because the editors aren't employees of the journal, but could receive a stipend depending on the journal. I don't believe AMS editorial boards are paid at all. Reviewers don't get paid, either. The actual costs involved are paying staff like assistants who help the editors, copy editors, printing, and running the servers that distribute online content. With the exception of running the servers, everything else is a one time cost. And for professional societies like AMS and RMS, they could cover the cost of the servers through membership dues. Alternatively, the costs of running servers could be eliminated with centralized repositories maintained by governments or private donations to ensure that scientific publications and hopefully also the data remain online and freely available.
There's no need to start my own journal. The AMS journals are sufficient.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Saturday January 02 2021, @10:01PM
I haven't published papers, so you may know better, or you may be just stuck on your opinion. From a long time ago in college, when I actually did some real science, it was common knowledge that most journals that charge subscription fees do not charge the author anything unless the author wants to pay them for open access (you noted that part). If that has changed, that's good. two anecdotal examples however are not enough to convince me of what 20 years ago was common knowledge.
I'm not saying you're wrong, nor am I saying I care enough to research this, or even read a generic multi-page dump of guidelines, which you called "fee structure" - which has fees buried deep somewhere in there, not visible to me after 30seconds. That's like saying "they charge a fee for publishing - source: their website."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 02 2021, @06:56PM (1 child)
In most cases, this is false.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_journals_by_preprint_policy [wikipedia.org]
Whatever you are trying to talk about is governed by copyright law.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Saturday January 02 2021, @09:32PM
>Whatever you are trying to talk about
it's this - you quoted it: "At that point in most contracts they now have full control of your paper"
so what I am talking about is post-submission, and "whatever you're talking" about is before submission, and before agreeing to the contract for that submission.
if you want to argue with facts, you're free to respond to what I actually wrote. show the same chart, and the publisher policy of putting an already published work in its original form, to an open access journal. Why you ask would many people want to do it in that order? Because the private publisher is free, and the open journal costs the author money, so you do that when you can.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Saturday January 02 2021, @03:39PM (4 children)
Scientific information wants to be free. Free from restriction, and free from paying to see it. And that means that the academic-journal model of scientific publishing will eventually need to go the way of the dodo. And the path to peer review needs to change.
The model that has historically produced great flowerings of science is quite clear:
1. Hire lots of smart inquisitive people with the job of doing research. Pay them enough that they aren't significantly worried about money, on some sort of experience-based pay schedule.
2. Give them easy access to each other's work and each other's time.
3. Give them as much space and equipment as you can afford.
4. To the degree that you manage them, it's largely to keep the people who have no clue what they're talking about from pestering them too much so they can get on with their work.
Is that model cost-efficient? Probably not. Does that model pay for itself many times over with scientific advances that are sometimes the result of goofing off and happy accidents? Absolutely. We know this because that's exactly what has happened in these kinds of environments, whether we're talking about the Library of Alexandria, Baghdad's House of Wisdom, or Bell Labs.
And once you have that model in your head, the role that was being handled by journals seems pretty clear, and are basically a subset of step 2 above: You want researchers to know about each others' work. The reasons for this are many - bouncing ideas off each other, inspiring each other, filling in each others' gaps in hypotheses and discoveries, etc. But there's no particular reason why Nature has to be involved in this: Storage space is cheap, servers are cheap, search technology is fairly well-developed, and the simplest idea is some sort of giant database of academic papers with the possibility of commentary and feedback. If we can do it for every popular song ever written (e.g. genius.com) we can do it for academic work.
And we won't get there so long as:
- Administrators with no knowledge in the field are able to fire people for failing to toe a party line.
- Researchers have to spend more time worrying about their reputation and thus their likely paycheck than their research.
- Research is controlled by MBAs who are more concerned with appearing to meet quarterly goals than they are with reality.
- There's a profit motive in locking up knowledge.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Informative) by PiMuNu on Saturday January 02 2021, @05:16PM (2 children)
> Scientific information wants to be free
No, it doesn't. Information has no desires.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Saturday January 02 2021, @08:05PM (1 child)
Right: It's true that the phrase is more than a bit anthropomorphic.
More strictly: Humans on average benefit from accurate information being widely shared rather than locked up behind artificial barriers, because the people that would benefit from knowing that information may not be the same people that have the right to rummage behind those artificial barriers. And yes, in order to achieve that benefit we have to figure out a way to ensure that creators of that accurate information get taken care of (or, in modern capitalist terms, get paid), but that doesn't mean we shouldn't set up systems for doing that.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Sunday January 03 2021, @10:03AM
That's better!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 02 2021, @09:50PM
In practice, one of the smart inquisitive people thinks he the smartest and takes on the airs of being management. Management likes this guy so he starts to get favors and sits in secret meetings where they decide who to keep and who to get rid of. Within a few short months/years your beautiful model is just the same old shit all over again.
(Score: 2) by Lester on Saturday January 02 2021, @05:06PM
Publishers were useful to transfer and broadcast knowledge. As most agents, they had a lot of power over supliers (researchers that want to publish) and buyers (universities and researchers that want information). To make things worse, they are an oligopoly.
There was not other way be up to date and to make public a research document . But after internet, that part of the process has become unnecessary. There is still other task to do, to filter. But they insist in behave as if they still had the full control.
Not anymore. Your have less work and your income is going to shrink.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2021, @12:32AM
The fact that science doesn't work in this way currently, is absolutely unbelievable. There's nothing to discuss or debate; you either want scientific progress and collaboration, or you want something else that has nothing to do with either; in which case, fuck you, you are a useless parasite on society.