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Publication cost should be considered on an equal footing with all the other costs necessary to run a lab. Reagents and buffers need to be paid for out of grant

Publication cost should be considered on an equal footing with all the other costs necessary to run a lab. Reagents and buffers need to be paid for out of grants, why not publication costs?

dougmccune 11y ago
One often overlooked aspect is what about all the areas of study that aren't well funded by grant money? The social sciences and humanities don't have the luxury of an abundance of funding. There's an argument that since currently funding for subscribing to HSS journals comes from the university library there is clearly money there for HSS, and that somehow we just need to redirect the subscription cost toward publication costs. But that's not an easy nut to crack, and it's also not clear why the library should even be involved in the publishing process in that way.
sswaner 11y ago
Labs typically don't pay for journal subscriptions. University libraries and academic departments subscribe as a benefit to the collective university community. A per-article subscription/purchase model would be more appropriate if we consider that the cost of peer-provided knowledge is a hard cost similar to reagents and buffers. But I personally agree with Open Access advocates, cost should be as close to free as reasonably possible.
- URSpider94 11y ago
  That wasn't true when I was a grad student. My lab had an individual (paper) subscription to a couple of critical journals in our field. Many individuals subscribe to "Nature", which is arguably the most prestigious general sciences journal out there. The landscape may have changed in the intervening years, with blanket institutional subscriptions making paper subscriptions irrelevant. I also suspect that, much like with albums and music, nobody actually reads a journal cover to cover these days, instead they are consuming the papers they want in a random-access fashion as a collection of PDF's.

Publication cost should be considered on an equal footing with all the other costs necessary to run a lab. Reagents and buffers need to be paid for out of grants, why not publication costs?

dougmccune 11y ago

One often overlooked aspect is what about all the areas of study that aren't well funded by grant money? The social sciences and humanities don't have the luxury of an abundance of funding. There's an argument that since currently funding for subscribing to HSS journals comes from the university library there is clearly money there for HSS, and that somehow we just need to redirect the subscription cost toward publication costs. But that's not an easy nut to crack, and it's also not clear why the library should even be involved in the publishing process in that way.

sswaner 11y ago

Labs typically don't pay for journal subscriptions. University libraries and academic departments subscribe as a benefit to the collective university community. A per-article subscription/purchase model would be more appropriate if we consider that the cost of peer-provided knowledge is a hard cost similar to reagents and buffers. But I personally agree with Open Access advocates, cost should be as close to free as reasonably possible.

URSpider94 11y ago
That wasn't true when I was a grad student. My lab had an individual (paper) subscription to a couple of critical journals in our field. Many individuals subscribe to "Nature", which is arguably the most prestigious general sciences journal out there. The landscape may have changed in the intervening years, with blanket institutional subscriptions making paper subscriptions irrelevant. I also suspect that, much like with albums and music, nobody actually reads a journal cover to cover these days, instead they are consuming the papers they want in a random-access fashion as a collection of PDF's.