[HN Gopher] EU ready to back immediate open access without autho... ___________________________________________________________________ EU ready to back immediate open access without author fees Author : daenney Score : 39 points Date : 2023-05-06 20:26 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.researchprofessionalnews.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.researchprofessionalnews.com) | alexfromapex wrote: | This is amazing. Some types of industries should not operate | under capitalism and research is probably one of those | industries, at least for life-saving research. | tomohelix wrote: | To this day, I still do not understand what can be a reasonable | cause for a paper to cost >$50 just to read it. Besides greed of | course. Editors review paper for free, authors pay to get paper | published, taxpayers fund the research. What do the journal's | staff actually do that worth that kind of money? | | All those "publisher" middlemen can go eat dirt and I would be | happy to shovel more dirt on them until they are 6 feet under. | They do no work, take all the profit, and obstruct research and | the spread of knowledge. Those are some of the worst scums of | capitalism. | contravariant wrote: | Frankly I dislike the situation as well but I like to play | devil's advocate for a bit. | | In some sense attaching a high cost to a paper is a crude way | of proving the quality of the paper. Putting all of the cost | with the authors is clearly not ideal, because you'd only | measure how much someone is willing to pay to get it published. | By placing the cost with the people reading the article you | ensure that the publisher must ensure their articles are | actually worth reading. | | The fact that getting incentives to align requires a random | party to get large profits without actually doing much is a | quirk of capitalism. If you ignore the concept of private | property for a bit you'll see that the obvious solution is to | simply burn up the excess money (capitalists would attempt to | sustain the illusion that money is indelible and privately | owned by viewing this as a tax). | stefan_ wrote: | That's not playing devil's advocate, that is playing | clueless. It's the institutions paying for paper access, and | not on a "per paper" basis; no ones incentives are being | aligned, no one is actually paying $50 to read a paper. | contravariant wrote: | If (as I claimed) it's just a token cost, I don't think it | matters much who is paying it. In fact it is almost better | if they get to claim universities find it worth an | expensive subscription, it's not like they're trying to | cover costs they're putting up a barrier to show it is | worth the trouble. | armchairhacker wrote: | Cost =/= quality on papers, almost all of the "best writings | of all time" are public domain, and many of the best papers | absolutely free. | | And most researchers _want_ their papers to be free, to the | point where you can email them and they will give you a free | copy, and they post the preprints on arXiv and their personal | website to get around publishing requirements. | contravariant wrote: | The journals aren't there to help spread their content | they're there to give the content a seal of authenticity. | As long as they can show researchers/universities are | willing to pay high fees they can claim that their contents | must be worth that much. | | Having free copies of the papers available doesn't actually | hurt them much, provided they're still the source for | 'authentic' copies. | | (sidenote: not sure what field you're talking about where | the best writings of all time are public domain but I've | had to pluck quite a few famous papers of scihub instead) | cpncrunch wrote: | Which editors, precisely, work for free? | | Elsevier's margin is 19%, which doesn't sound like "the worst | scums of capitalism". | | If you believe you can do it cheaper, with better quality | (because peer review kinda sucks even for top journals), by all | means go ahead. I would love that to happen. But, as you can | probably guess, I'm kinda skeptical. | goosedragons wrote: | The academic editors. And the peer reviewers (who basically | edit too). | cpncrunch wrote: | Yes, peer reviewers tend to work for free. Can you give an | example of an editor who works for free? I asked in the | parent comment, but nobody has provided any examples | (although they have downvoted it, oddly). I'm not aware of | any editors who work for free for top tier journals. | | https://www.glassdoor.ca/Salary/Elsevier-Editor- | Salaries-E23... | _Wintermute wrote: | Elsevier's profit margin is 37% from what I can find. | cpncrunch wrote: | https://www.google.com/finance/quote/REN:AMS | | "Net profit margin: 19.04" | tomohelix wrote: | A quick google search quickly shows you are either uninformed | or lying. Elsevier margin is at least 37% in 2018 and its | profit has increased in 2022. | | https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX- | Group/documents/pr... | | Most journal reviewers and editors are academics who do the | work as public service, i.e. free. Even top spots like editor | in chief only get an honorarium of maybe 10k a year. | Considering these people are the top of their field and can | easily command 6-7 figures salary at minimum, that amount is | nothing. Only very few journals have full time editors and | even those end up relying on the volunteers to vet and review | articles. | | A full time professor is expected to be an editor for some | journals. And these academics make up the bulk of "journal | editors". But they would not list it as their jobs. I suspect | that is why if you look for "editor jobs" you will get | lobsided salary ranges that doesn't reflect reality. | ClumsyPilot wrote: | > They do no work, take all the profit, and obstruct research | and the spread of knowledge. Those are some of the worst scums | of capitalism. | | People like naking comparison to natural selection, hierarchies | and food chains. | | However they mistakenly believe that Lion is at the top of the | food chain. Then they start discussing irrelevant issues, like | if lion is being too mean to the herbivores. | | Their understanding is fundamentally wrong - the lion is not at | the top. The parasites that live in the lion are at the top. | | The punlishers are parasites. They are at the top. | | How does nature remove parasites, say tapeworms? It doesn't, | only extenral intervention like surgery can remove them. | nordsieck wrote: | > How does nature remove parasites, say tapeworms? It | doesn't, only extenral intervention like surgery can remove | them. | | Presumably there is an evolutionary arms race going on | between host and parasite. | aziaziazi wrote: | To make them disappear you may remove their habitat and food | : the lions. Or as the author propose : the publishers. | bandika wrote: | It's not just that. I had only two articles published in well | known journals, but in both cases the reviewers main criticism | was that I didn't cite the reviewer's own article. It's an | utterly corrupt system, something you learn to live with it | when you decide to choose academic life. | jltsiren wrote: | Scientific publishers have high profit margins, but the prices | are still within the right order of magnitude. Most research | papers have a very narrow target audience. Publishers do a | nontrivial amount of typesetting and administrative work for | each paper, and that must be covered by a small number of | downloads. | sylware wrote: | [flagged] | s1k3s wrote: | Since there are some comments that seem to misunderstand it | (clickbait title also btw), this is about "papers reporting | publicly funded research". | neets wrote: | Better to ask forgiveness than ask permission, eh Facebook ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-05-06 23:00 UTC)