i suspect on some level this is preaching to the choir, since i'm sure tildes's demographics make this a not-unpopular opinion, but i'd be interested to see if there's anyone on here who actually...
i suspect on some level this is preaching to the choir, since i'm sure tildes's demographics make this a not-unpopular opinion, but i'd be interested to see if there's anyone on here who actually does support the current status quo for academic publishing (wholeheartedly or just because you think it's the best option currently available), since it occurs to me that i've never actually heard the contra-viewpoint to this.
I've been in a discussion on a subreddit under a posting regarding piracy (IIRC), and the folks just knew nothing of the economics of exploitation that takes place in the futile industry of...
I've been in a discussion on a subreddit under a posting regarding piracy (IIRC), and the folks just knew nothing of the economics of exploitation that takes place in the futile industry of academic publishing. They thought scihub was freeloading and OA was a movement to legalise stealing. And the dumbfucks commenters simply wouldn't understand that this is a scheme of exploitation, that SciHub is a heroic piece of promethean activism, and that Open Access is a movement backed by thousands of academics that fights against fraudulent pests that feed on tax money we give to research institutions so that they do research. And ironically, that was the r/Turkey subreddit, and all Turkish academic journals are Open Access.
That was to illustrate that it seems to me that the public is completely uninformed on this topic. I myself am, if it was not obvious from the above paragraph, a supporter of OA as a researcher-to-become, and an admirer of Elbakyan and SciHub.
Well, the current situation in practice is, arguably, a cold war between numerous groups. It's not a good situation, or even necessarily a sustainable one, but it is by no means the worst...
Well, the current situation in practice is, arguably, a cold war between numerous groups. It's not a good situation, or even necessarily a sustainable one, but it is by no means the worst situation.
University libraries pay publishers for subscriptions because they fear backlash from researchers who want to be able to readily access everything. Publishers fear overly antagonizing libraries because they rely on researcher good will to publish with them and review for them, and widely on easy accessibility to increase citations to their journals, which in turn increase reputation and prominence: Elsevier is a bit of an exception here, and has had repercussions for it, including publishing and reviewing boycotts that predate the recent UC decision. Researchers fear a lack of readership or continued accessibility and archiving, skepticism about peer review, and getting lost in a flood of insignificant works, while the costs of open-access publishing make it the territory only of researchers with funding to spare, or with funding agencies willing to pay the costs.
Meanwhile, in many fields, it is standard practice for researchers to post copies of their papers on their personal websites, something that Google Scholar has employed to make papers more accessible. Many journals try to accommodate this by allowing the posting of articles in manuscript form, but in reality, many researchers ignore this, and just post the final copy.
And any bold move from the status quo risks a huge conflict. Publishers are currently well within their legal rights in many countries to bankrupt or imprison prominent researchers for flagrant copyright violations, but to do so would be utterly suicidal: no one would ever publish with them again. A university could well say to a researcher that, for example, they would no longer have easy access to the proceedings of the most prominent conference in their field, but that researcher is likely going to start looking for positions elsewhere, and for prominent researchers, there will be no shortage of universities willing to poach them away. A researcher could insist on publishing only in pure open-access journals, but they'd find themselves paying enormous publishing fees, limiting their readership, or, as appears to be the case in string theory, publishing in non-peer-reviewed spaces and relying on personal reputation and connections for readership and trust, which is not a good situation to be in.
I'm not really sure who pays the absurd per-article charges that essentially all publishers have on their websites. For most academics, I think this is all an issue of convenience rather than ability to ever access something: in the worst case, in many fields, it is standard etiquette for researchers to send PDFs to anyone who requests them by email (many journals let authors pay a small fee for a certain number of "reprints" for this purpose, but I'm not aware of anyone who actually pays this). Convenience is the reason why many researchers use scihub even for journals they have legal access to. When you're at a conference, and want to look up a paper the presenter has just referenced, what's easier? Trying to deal with whatever hoops the publisher requires for your credentials, then dealing with the HTML/readcube/linked-figure/please-look-at-the-article-online-and-stay-on-our website nonsense in order to get to the PDF version? Making your campus VPN work on the sketchy wifi? Or pasting the DOI into scihub?
The people who really lose out here are those outside of prominent universities, who would struggle to get access in a convenient way: searching through old personal websites, or needing to send and receive an email, every time you want to read a paragraph in a paper would be extremely time consuming.
Yet an immediate move to pure open access in the current predominant open access model, as this article seems to promote, would have its own problems. As with other articles I've recently seen on Tildes from Undark, I site I hadn't seen before, this article seems to present a simple, brash, "why don't we just do this?" argument by ignoring all complexities and counterpoints. Beyond everything else, the suggestion that "funders have an absolute right to set the terms of access for the work they fund. After all, they pay the bills." is distressing. Do funders also have an absolute right to set the results of the work they fund? After all, they pay the bills.
In my experience, the standard open access model is not something feared by publishers, but promoted by them: why worry about subscription fees when you can get authors to pay you in advance? Many publishers I've published with advertise open access when going through their publication process: they'll point out how, for the small fee of, eg, $4,000 in the case of most ACS journals, you can make it so everyone can read your paper without jumping through hoops, and they'll link to studies that show open-access papers get X% more citations, on average, and isn't $4,000 worth the benefit to your career?
Every peer reviewed, open access or hybrid open access journal has these fees. That extends to for-profit publishers, like Springer-Nature and Elsevier, and non-profits, like PLOS, NAS, RSC, ACS, etc. For pure open access journals, where the only choice is to pay the fees, this arguably limits publication to those researchers who can afford to pay. It also raises a question, when funds come from the author rather than the reader, as to whether the publisher is incentivized to publish sketchier research, rather than reject papers that should be rejected, and lose the fees.
I don't know what the solution is: in typical academic fashion, I'll limit myself to just pointing out problems. I would suggest that having funding agencies fund journals directly, rather than providing open access fees to researchers, might make more sense, and avoid the perverse incentives.
Academic publishing is an absolute mess but I do not want it to be free. Papers should be extremely cheap to access their full-text, say a 1$ for the general pubic. Universities would need a more...
Academic publishing is an absolute mess but I do not want it to be free. Papers should be extremely cheap to access their full-text, say a 1$ for the general pubic. Universities would need a more nuanced deal. But publishers should exist and charge for access. That money needs to go towards improving peer-review so that educated individuals can actually get paid for their time. As well as improving paper discoveribility and making data more widely available.
Basically all we need is publishers who will act in good faith to improve science instead of being the leeches they currently are. I am glad that open source journals exist, and it's a good way to fight big publishers but journal quality, peer review, and replication are all real problems that could also be addressed by rethinking how we charge for access.
As an academic, papers should be completely, 100% free. Peer review is not something that requires funding from people looking at papers, if I want a paper published in a conference or journal I...
As an academic, papers should be completely, 100% free. Peer review is not something that requires funding from people looking at papers, if I want a paper published in a conference or journal I am obligated to review papers (to say nothing of my university employment contract that mandates a portion of my time to be spent with engagement including reviewing).
I personally have free access to every publishing venue on the planet because my institution pays for it, but that payment is based on taxpayer funds and tuition fees (and is ridiculously inflated). And knowing Elsevier and co
Basically all we need is publishers who will act in good faith to improve science instead of being the leeches they currently are
Is about as wishful as hoping that everybody would start loving thy neighbour and not doing anything bad ever.
I don't know, I would lean against a taxpayer funded system because I think they wouldn't do significantly better than a for-profit. It also doesn't have to be a for-profit, a non-profit like...
I don't know, I would lean against a taxpayer funded system because I think they wouldn't do significantly better than a for-profit. It also doesn't have to be a for-profit, a non-profit like Wikipedia could do an acceptable job. Anyways, my worry about a taxpayer funded system is that it would try it's best to be unbiased and inclusive. Initially this might be great. But over time lobbyists for anti-vax, anti-gmo, and other pseudoscience groups would lobby against it and eventually undrermine its standards.
Either solution or both would probably work relatively well compared to the current situation.
i think a per-paper approach like this wouldn't ultimately be that helpful, personally (at least not without things like the subsidized access to many academic databases that university students...
Academic publishing is an absolute mess but I do not want it to be free. Papers should be extremely cheap to access their full-text, say a 1$ for the general pubic.
i think a per-paper approach like this wouldn't ultimately be that helpful, personally (at least not without things like the subsidized access to many academic databases that university students get). it's not the worst model for people who don't do or need that much research access, but something like that stacks up quickly for people who do, especially if they're strapped for cash. just in writing papers this year, for example, i've gone through probably a hundred or so journal articles in at least some capacity. under a model like that, i'd probably just be better off outright paying for a JSTOR subscription (19.50/mo or $199 a year), because then i'd have access to everything.
That's why I mentioned universities could have a different deal. The 1$ access level is sort of like the default. Libraries, Companies, and Universities could all work out their own pricing. The...
That's why I mentioned universities could have a different deal. The 1$ access level is sort of like the default. Libraries, Companies, and Universities could all work out their own pricing. The point is just reasonably utilize that money to improve peer review and the other issue I mentioned.
As someone planning to become a researcher---I think it is part of the job description (factual or ideal) of an academic to publish articles, and review the work of others. So either that is...
As someone planning to become a researcher---I think it is part of the job description (factual or ideal) of an academic to publish articles, and review the work of others. So either that is included in the wage, or the wages need to be adjusted, increased so that researchers are not undercompensated (if that's a word...).
But access should absolutely be free. The taxpayer pays towards it already, why the extra payment?
And when publishing is such an easy task by now, and WWW is here, why are publishers needed? Why wouldn't universities or field-specific research foundations be able to organise peer review?
These are good arguments, but I think there still need to be incentives for researchers to review papers. Psychologically people want to be rewarded for their behavior and if researchers are...
These are good arguments, but I think there still need to be incentives for researchers to review papers. Psychologically people want to be rewarded for their behavior and if researchers are already being paid to review articles they aren't doing it enough. There's also still a need for publishers to have dedicated general reviewers.
As for access being free you might be right, maybe people do deserve to get it for free. But publishers still need to exist whether or not universities or specific research foundations are doing the job. Somebody still needs to organize the peer-review process, standardize paper accessibility, and notify people of what they're distributing.
Having just spent some time reviewing a paper for an ACS journal, we certainly don't get any compensation for reviews in the current system, and I don't know of any journal in our field that does....
Having just spent some time reviewing a paper for an ACS journal, we certainly don't get any compensation for reviews in the current system, and I don't know of any journal in our field that does. That's not why we do it...
I might be able to understand a system that would pay reviewers, but the process would be complicated and fraught with perils. How could you ensure the quality of reviews, rather than something sent in just to get the payment? Would you pay a fixed amount per review, or would it depend on the depth of the review? I've seen reviews where the reviewer clearly only looked at the figures, reviews where the reviewer spent an hour or two looking over everything and pointing out things they couldn't understand, reviews where the reviewer took the time to understand everything and then carefully pointed out potential weaknesses, and one review where the reviewer spent an enormous amount of time thinking about the paper, brought several other researchers in for meetings about it, contacted the publisher in order to get in touch with the authors directly, met with them, and ended up, after more than a year, turning a weak paper into one that is frequently cited in the field.
If reviews are paid a fixed amount, that would seem to place a particular value on the reviews, and would likely limit consideration to something the reviewer saw as appropriate for that payment. Instead, in the current system, reviewers obtain access to unpublished research before anyone else, which benefits their understanding of the forefront of research, and by reviewing the work, help advance the field. As with many things in academia, the rewards are not financial, and trying to ascribe some monetary value to individual tasks, from some business-oriented framework, seems out of place. Instead, why not just let everyone be paid their salaries, and do the work that they think will best advance their field?
Beyond that, the idea of "dedicated general reviewers" is confusing to me. Reviewers are generally not dedicated or general, because the usual goal of peer review is to have work reviewed by peers who are experts in the specific field of research. General reviewing of the sort you refer to would seem to be more the purview of editors, who usually are paid.
I think everything that is publicly funded at least to some extent should be 100% free. Privately funded research should be available at a very low price.
I think everything that is publicly funded at least to some extent should be 100% free. Privately funded research should be available at a very low price.
But how does that happen? Following the model suggested in this article, publicly funded research would be "100% free" because public funding agencies would throw money at publishers.
But how does that happen? Following the model suggested in this article, publicly funded research would be "100% free" because public funding agencies would throw money at publishers.
i suspect on some level this is preaching to the choir, since i'm sure tildes's demographics make this a not-unpopular opinion, but i'd be interested to see if there's anyone on here who actually does support the current status quo for academic publishing (wholeheartedly or just because you think it's the best option currently available), since it occurs to me that i've never actually heard the contra-viewpoint to this.
I've been in a discussion on a subreddit under a posting regarding piracy (IIRC), and the folks just knew nothing of the economics of exploitation that takes place in the futile industry of academic publishing. They thought scihub was freeloading and OA was a movement to legalise stealing. And the
dumbfuckscommenters simply wouldn't understand that this is a scheme of exploitation, that SciHub is a heroic piece of promethean activism, and that Open Access is a movement backed by thousands of academics that fights against fraudulent pests that feed on tax money we give to research institutions so that they do research. And ironically, that was the r/Turkey subreddit, and all Turkish academic journals are Open Access.That was to illustrate that it seems to me that the public is completely uninformed on this topic. I myself am, if it was not obvious from the above paragraph, a supporter of OA as a researcher-to-become, and an admirer of Elbakyan and SciHub.
Well, the current situation in practice is, arguably, a cold war between numerous groups. It's not a good situation, or even necessarily a sustainable one, but it is by no means the worst situation.
University libraries pay publishers for subscriptions because they fear backlash from researchers who want to be able to readily access everything. Publishers fear overly antagonizing libraries because they rely on researcher good will to publish with them and review for them, and widely on easy accessibility to increase citations to their journals, which in turn increase reputation and prominence: Elsevier is a bit of an exception here, and has had repercussions for it, including publishing and reviewing boycotts that predate the recent UC decision. Researchers fear a lack of readership or continued accessibility and archiving, skepticism about peer review, and getting lost in a flood of insignificant works, while the costs of open-access publishing make it the territory only of researchers with funding to spare, or with funding agencies willing to pay the costs.
Meanwhile, in many fields, it is standard practice for researchers to post copies of their papers on their personal websites, something that Google Scholar has employed to make papers more accessible. Many journals try to accommodate this by allowing the posting of articles in manuscript form, but in reality, many researchers ignore this, and just post the final copy.
And any bold move from the status quo risks a huge conflict. Publishers are currently well within their legal rights in many countries to bankrupt or imprison prominent researchers for flagrant copyright violations, but to do so would be utterly suicidal: no one would ever publish with them again. A university could well say to a researcher that, for example, they would no longer have easy access to the proceedings of the most prominent conference in their field, but that researcher is likely going to start looking for positions elsewhere, and for prominent researchers, there will be no shortage of universities willing to poach them away. A researcher could insist on publishing only in pure open-access journals, but they'd find themselves paying enormous publishing fees, limiting their readership, or, as appears to be the case in string theory, publishing in non-peer-reviewed spaces and relying on personal reputation and connections for readership and trust, which is not a good situation to be in.
I'm not really sure who pays the absurd per-article charges that essentially all publishers have on their websites. For most academics, I think this is all an issue of convenience rather than ability to ever access something: in the worst case, in many fields, it is standard etiquette for researchers to send PDFs to anyone who requests them by email (many journals let authors pay a small fee for a certain number of "reprints" for this purpose, but I'm not aware of anyone who actually pays this). Convenience is the reason why many researchers use scihub even for journals they have legal access to. When you're at a conference, and want to look up a paper the presenter has just referenced, what's easier? Trying to deal with whatever hoops the publisher requires for your credentials, then dealing with the HTML/readcube/linked-figure/please-look-at-the-article-online-and-stay-on-our website nonsense in order to get to the PDF version? Making your campus VPN work on the sketchy wifi? Or pasting the DOI into scihub?
The people who really lose out here are those outside of prominent universities, who would struggle to get access in a convenient way: searching through old personal websites, or needing to send and receive an email, every time you want to read a paragraph in a paper would be extremely time consuming.
Yet an immediate move to pure open access in the current predominant open access model, as this article seems to promote, would have its own problems. As with other articles I've recently seen on Tildes from Undark, I site I hadn't seen before, this article seems to present a simple, brash, "why don't we just do this?" argument by ignoring all complexities and counterpoints. Beyond everything else, the suggestion that "funders have an absolute right to set the terms of access for the work they fund. After all, they pay the bills." is distressing. Do funders also have an absolute right to set the results of the work they fund? After all, they pay the bills.
In my experience, the standard open access model is not something feared by publishers, but promoted by them: why worry about subscription fees when you can get authors to pay you in advance? Many publishers I've published with advertise open access when going through their publication process: they'll point out how, for the small fee of, eg, $4,000 in the case of most ACS journals, you can make it so everyone can read your paper without jumping through hoops, and they'll link to studies that show open-access papers get X% more citations, on average, and isn't $4,000 worth the benefit to your career?
Every peer reviewed, open access or hybrid open access journal has these fees. That extends to for-profit publishers, like Springer-Nature and Elsevier, and non-profits, like PLOS, NAS, RSC, ACS, etc. For pure open access journals, where the only choice is to pay the fees, this arguably limits publication to those researchers who can afford to pay. It also raises a question, when funds come from the author rather than the reader, as to whether the publisher is incentivized to publish sketchier research, rather than reject papers that should be rejected, and lose the fees.
I don't know what the solution is: in typical academic fashion, I'll limit myself to just pointing out problems. I would suggest that having funding agencies fund journals directly, rather than providing open access fees to researchers, might make more sense, and avoid the perverse incentives.
Academic publishing is an absolute mess but I do not want it to be free. Papers should be extremely cheap to access their full-text, say a 1$ for the general pubic. Universities would need a more nuanced deal. But publishers should exist and charge for access. That money needs to go towards improving peer-review so that educated individuals can actually get paid for their time. As well as improving paper discoveribility and making data more widely available.
Basically all we need is publishers who will act in good faith to improve science instead of being the leeches they currently are. I am glad that open source journals exist, and it's a good way to fight big publishers but journal quality, peer review, and replication are all real problems that could also be addressed by rethinking how we charge for access.
As an academic, papers should be completely, 100% free. Peer review is not something that requires funding from people looking at papers, if I want a paper published in a conference or journal I am obligated to review papers (to say nothing of my university employment contract that mandates a portion of my time to be spent with engagement including reviewing).
I personally have free access to every publishing venue on the planet because my institution pays for it, but that payment is based on taxpayer funds and tuition fees (and is ridiculously inflated). And knowing Elsevier and co
Is about as wishful as hoping that everybody would start loving thy neighbour and not doing anything bad ever.
I don't know, I would lean against a taxpayer funded system because I think they wouldn't do significantly better than a for-profit. It also doesn't have to be a for-profit, a non-profit like Wikipedia could do an acceptable job. Anyways, my worry about a taxpayer funded system is that it would try it's best to be unbiased and inclusive. Initially this might be great. But over time lobbyists for anti-vax, anti-gmo, and other pseudoscience groups would lobby against it and eventually undrermine its standards.
Either solution or both would probably work relatively well compared to the current situation.
i think a per-paper approach like this wouldn't ultimately be that helpful, personally (at least not without things like the subsidized access to many academic databases that university students get). it's not the worst model for people who don't do or need that much research access, but something like that stacks up quickly for people who do, especially if they're strapped for cash. just in writing papers this year, for example, i've gone through probably a hundred or so journal articles in at least some capacity. under a model like that, i'd probably just be better off outright paying for a JSTOR subscription (19.50/mo or $199 a year), because then i'd have access to everything.
That's why I mentioned universities could have a different deal. The 1$ access level is sort of like the default. Libraries, Companies, and Universities could all work out their own pricing. The point is just reasonably utilize that money to improve peer review and the other issue I mentioned.
As someone planning to become a researcher---I think it is part of the job description (factual or ideal) of an academic to publish articles, and review the work of others. So either that is included in the wage, or the wages need to be adjusted, increased so that researchers are not undercompensated (if that's a word...).
But access should absolutely be free. The taxpayer pays towards it already, why the extra payment?
And when publishing is such an easy task by now, and WWW is here, why are publishers needed? Why wouldn't universities or field-specific research foundations be able to organise peer review?
These are good arguments, but I think there still need to be incentives for researchers to review papers. Psychologically people want to be rewarded for their behavior and if researchers are already being paid to review articles they aren't doing it enough. There's also still a need for publishers to have dedicated general reviewers.
As for access being free you might be right, maybe people do deserve to get it for free. But publishers still need to exist whether or not universities or specific research foundations are doing the job. Somebody still needs to organize the peer-review process, standardize paper accessibility, and notify people of what they're distributing.
Having just spent some time reviewing a paper for an ACS journal, we certainly don't get any compensation for reviews in the current system, and I don't know of any journal in our field that does. That's not why we do it...
I might be able to understand a system that would pay reviewers, but the process would be complicated and fraught with perils. How could you ensure the quality of reviews, rather than something sent in just to get the payment? Would you pay a fixed amount per review, or would it depend on the depth of the review? I've seen reviews where the reviewer clearly only looked at the figures, reviews where the reviewer spent an hour or two looking over everything and pointing out things they couldn't understand, reviews where the reviewer took the time to understand everything and then carefully pointed out potential weaknesses, and one review where the reviewer spent an enormous amount of time thinking about the paper, brought several other researchers in for meetings about it, contacted the publisher in order to get in touch with the authors directly, met with them, and ended up, after more than a year, turning a weak paper into one that is frequently cited in the field.
If reviews are paid a fixed amount, that would seem to place a particular value on the reviews, and would likely limit consideration to something the reviewer saw as appropriate for that payment. Instead, in the current system, reviewers obtain access to unpublished research before anyone else, which benefits their understanding of the forefront of research, and by reviewing the work, help advance the field. As with many things in academia, the rewards are not financial, and trying to ascribe some monetary value to individual tasks, from some business-oriented framework, seems out of place. Instead, why not just let everyone be paid their salaries, and do the work that they think will best advance their field?
Beyond that, the idea of "dedicated general reviewers" is confusing to me. Reviewers are generally not dedicated or general, because the usual goal of peer review is to have work reviewed by peers who are experts in the specific field of research. General reviewing of the sort you refer to would seem to be more the purview of editors, who usually are paid.
A good job for the universities themselves.
Could easily be in the form of bonuses and recognition.
I think everything that is publicly funded at least to some extent should be 100% free. Privately funded research should be available at a very low price.
But how does that happen? Following the model suggested in this article, publicly funded research would be "100% free" because public funding agencies would throw money at publishers.
I don't know. Here in Brazil, most research happens in public universities, and most of it is published for free on their websites.