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I think people haven't totally thought this open access thing through. First, publishing costs money, even in the digital age. It costs money to comb through

I think people haven't totally thought this open access thing through. First, publishing costs money, even in the digital age. It costs money to comb through submissions and decide which ones are worth pursuing. It costs money to hassle scientists into reviewing the submissions. It costs money to convert every submission into the same format. It costs money to develop and host a website to disseminate the articles. All of these things cost money. Now, who is going to pay for it? Traditionally these costs were put onto the research institutions in the form of library subscription fees. Open access shifts this burden onto the author, and ideally grants would include that into the budget. Even if grants include that in their budget (and many don't yet), there's a finite amount of money available for research. Shifting the cost of publishing onto grants will make funding available for actual research even smaller than it is now. In some fields publishing costs are entirely negligible compared to the cost of research, but in others it's not. Also, open access would mean that you have to have funding in order to publish a paper. As it stands right now you don't actually need funding to do research in certain fields. A math professor at a university can devote some of his spare time to a project over several years and publish a paper on it with no costs at all. This happens all the time, not every paper has funding behind it. I'm not necessarily arguing against open access, I just think people haven't fully explored the downsides of moving away from our current system.

dalke 11y ago
They've been plenty explored, discussed, chewed over, and more, including the scenarios your presented. The costs have been analyzed in dozens of different ways, with many business models proposed and some executed upon. (Note that your mathematician gets indirect funding by having access to the university library. As a non-academic, I can use the local college library but must pay access fees for some services that are free to staff and students. At a somewhat further away university library, as a visitor I can read journals online but am not permitted to make copies.) Nor is our "current system", concentrated as it is in the hands of Elsevier (and its 37% profit on revenue), all that old. Most people outside the big publishing companies didn't fully explore the downsides of moving away from the system we had before the 1980s - or at the least, nothing like the ongoing discussions concerning open access.
afandian 11y ago
http://arxiv.org/ http://arxiv.org/
effie 11y ago
> Now, who is going to pay for it? Taypayers, as it is now. The difference is, with parasitic incumbents gone, the price will fall down massively.
csydas 11y ago
Distribution companies made sense prior to the advent of the internet. But you can host journals over bittorrent easily, and if they were legal journals, there'd be no reason for people to stop seeding, since there's no penalty to do so. I think your post has a bit of confusion, because as far as I know, the platforms themselves are not doing the peer review, they're just hosting the content. The big complaint about these platforms is that the institutions that send out the papers to these platforms do so completely independent of the authors. The platforms do not fund the authors, the institutions do, and for whatever reason, the institutions continue to deal with the platforms. The platforms themselves are quickly becoming irrelevant. Hosting costs are dropping radically, and the curation methods used by the platforms are very out-dated and more focused on anti-piracy techniques instead of making the information they're hosting accessible. The only reason they're staying relevant is due to the requirement that institutions publish to them, it's not as a result of actual service provided. The current platforms are a legacy item and they are inhibiting research. Like a lot of old legacy services, at a time they made sense, but more and more they don't.

dalke 11y ago

They've been plenty explored, discussed, chewed over, and more, including the scenarios your presented. The costs have been analyzed in dozens of different ways, with many business models proposed and some executed upon. (Note that your mathematician gets indirect funding by having access to the university library. As a non-academic, I can use the local college library but must pay access fees for some services that are free to staff and students. At a somewhat further away university library, as a visitor I can read journals online but am not permitted to make copies.) Nor is our "current system", concentrated as it is in the hands of Elsevier (and its 37% profit on revenue), all that old. Most people outside the big publishing companies didn't fully explore the downsides of moving away from the system we had before the 1980s - or at the least, nothing like the ongoing discussions concerning open access.

afandian 11y ago

http://arxiv.org/ http://arxiv.org/

effie 11y ago

> Now, who is going to pay for it? Taypayers, as it is now. The difference is, with parasitic incumbents gone, the price will fall down massively.

csydas 11y ago

Distribution companies made sense prior to the advent of the internet. But you can host journals over bittorrent easily, and if they were legal journals, there'd be no reason for people to stop seeding, since there's no penalty to do so. I think your post has a bit of confusion, because as far as I know, the platforms themselves are not doing the peer review, they're just hosting the content. The big complaint about these platforms is that the institutions that send out the papers to these platforms do so completely independent of the authors. The platforms do not fund the authors, the institutions do, and for whatever reason, the institutions continue to deal with the platforms. The platforms themselves are quickly becoming irrelevant. Hosting costs are dropping radically, and the curation methods used by the platforms are very out-dated and more focused on anti-piracy techniques instead of making the information they're hosting accessible. The only reason they're staying relevant is due to the requirement that institutions publish to them, it's not as a result of actual service provided. The current platforms are a legacy item and they are inhibiting research. Like a lot of old legacy services, at a time they made sense, but more and more they don't.