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> The funding only covered research, not publication Not true, many grants require publication. Any grant giving money to do research that doesnt require any r

by return0 11y ago

> The funding only covered research, not publication Not true, many grants require publication. Any grant giving money to do research that doesnt require any results is fraud. > Then set one up. PLoS, frontiers, eLife, there are plenty and they are good, but until we can drag the critical mass of high-impact scientists into these open publishers, they will keep being underdogs. You need a systemic change here that will at once pull the good reviewers and good scientists to them, in other respects they are much better than elsevier in some technical respects. The problem is that academia is not the free market. The currency is 'prestige' and its proven very very hard to change attitudes without a) a generation dying or b) regulatory action or c) doing something illegal. It's regulations (specifically requiring high impact publications) that brought elsevier to become the arbiter of scientific importance after all. We either have to regulate paywalls out of academia completely, or find a way to replace the institutional role of publishing with something else. In any case, your 'this is free market' approach is wrong here i think. Academia is not a free market.

ikeboy 11y ago
I didn't say they don't require publication, only that they aren't paying for it. Plenty of Elsevier titles offer open access for a fee now. And PLOS and co are putting pressure to reduce margins. I don't think it's bad enough that something illegal needs to be done to force it to fix itself. And I've asked before: if Elsevier slashed all their prices by 30%, would people be happy with it? If the answer is no, then they aren't only complaining about profit.
- return0 11y ago
  Grants typically include publishing costs, it's very rare the scientist will pay out of pocket. And because grant agencies encourage high impact publications it's not small amounts. Ironically, grants that require open access while encouraging high-impact publication end up paying more, as high-impact journals charge more for open access. I agree that money is not the major issue, but the entrapment of useful information in closed systems and its decentralization. We have machine learning systems that could consume the vast amounts of data and come up with potentially life-saving results, but we don't have access to the data, because for 50+ years its been more and more locked in.
  - ikeboy 11y ago
    My understanding is that the publisher subsidizes publishing costs and makes it up on access charges. So if the grant didn't pay the cost to publish, the publisher will. I agree that it's a nice ideal to have everything open, but people need to realize that there are costs to doing so, and merely saying "I paid for it, therefore I have a right to read it" doesn't do much.
    - cinquemb 11y ago
      >I agree that it's a nice ideal to have everything open, but people need to realize that there are costs to doing so, and merely saying "I paid for it, therefore I have a right to read it" doesn't do much. You're right, that's why places like sci-hub exist, and Elsevier et al dont seem to be winning this fight…
  - Fomite 11y ago
    > Grants typically include publishing costs, it's very rare the scientist will pay out of pocket. Though for small labs just starting out, two or three open access publications written into a grant definitely could have gone to salary for someone. Even if it's written into a grant, it's not a trivial expense.

by return0 11y ago

ikeboy 11y ago

I didn't say they don't require publication, only that they aren't paying for it. Plenty of Elsevier titles offer open access for a fee now. And PLOS and co are putting pressure to reduce margins. I don't think it's bad enough that something illegal needs to be done to force it to fix itself. And I've asked before: if Elsevier slashed all their prices by 30%, would people be happy with it? If the answer is no, then they aren't only complaining about profit.

return0 11y ago
Grants typically include publishing costs, it's very rare the scientist will pay out of pocket. And because grant agencies encourage high impact publications it's not small amounts. Ironically, grants that require open access while encouraging high-impact publication end up paying more, as high-impact journals charge more for open access. I agree that money is not the major issue, but the entrapment of useful information in closed systems and its decentralization. We have machine learning systems that could consume the vast amounts of data and come up with potentially life-saving results, but we don't have access to the data, because for 50+ years its been more and more locked in.
- ikeboy 11y ago
  My understanding is that the publisher subsidizes publishing costs and makes it up on access charges. So if the grant didn't pay the cost to publish, the publisher will. I agree that it's a nice ideal to have everything open, but people need to realize that there are costs to doing so, and merely saying "I paid for it, therefore I have a right to read it" doesn't do much.
  - cinquemb 11y ago
    >I agree that it's a nice ideal to have everything open, but people need to realize that there are costs to doing so, and merely saying "I paid for it, therefore I have a right to read it" doesn't do much. You're right, that's why places like sci-hub exist, and Elsevier et al dont seem to be winning this fight…
- Fomite 11y ago
  > Grants typically include publishing costs, it's very rare the scientist will pay out of pocket. Though for small labs just starting out, two or three open access publications written into a grant definitely could have gone to salary for someone. Even if it's written into a grant, it's not a trivial expense.