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The counter argument to this is you pay to use national parks even though you already pay for it. A lot of people don't even go to the parks now. Making them fr

• privong 11y ago
  > If it is free then tax payers will have to pay more to make sure it is available. That's necessarily true. It's true that universities pay for journal subscriptions, but I guess a significant portion (or even all) of that expense is covered by the overheads universities charge grants. Given that a significant number of grants are taxpayer-paid, it's likely that tax payers are already paying for the journal subscriptions. So making them open access will shift the costs around, but it isn't immediately obvious that it will cost the taxpayers more than it currently does.
  • FussyZeus 11y ago
    It's also a much greater undertaking for any individual person to purchase one of those subscriptions, I don't think I've ever heard of a single person doing so where they didn't have some portion of it covered by an employer where the field is relevant, or a university. Anyone have any rough numbers on what this would cost Joe Schmo to buy?
    • privong 11y ago
      > Anyone have any rough numbers on what this would cost Joe Schmo to buy? There's a huge variety. An individual subscription to Nature is $200/year[0], but they often charge $30 for electronic access to individual articles. An institutional subscription to the Astrophysical Journal is $2000/year[1], though if you're a member of a professional society, you can buy an individual, electronic subscription for $25[e.g., 2]. As a point of comparison within astronomy, a similarly prestigious journal, the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society institutional subscription is $9400/year[in the csv link in 3]. [0] http://www.nature.com/ecommerce/subscribe.action?productId=nature http://www.nature.com/ecommerce/subscribe.action?productId=n... [1] https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/0004-637X/page/Pricing%20and%20ordering https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/0004-637X/page/Pricing%20... [2] https://aas.org/individual-membership/dues-subscription-fees https://aas.org/individual-membership/dues-subscription-fees [3] http://www.oxfordjournals.org/en/access-purchase/pricing-and-ordering/institutional-pricing.html http://www.oxfordjournals.org/en/access-purchase/pricing-and...
• silverlight 11y ago
  I think there's a difference. Going to a National Park requires additional resources above just having a National Park. People to assist you, additional infrastructure like bathrooms and campsites, etc. So I think it makes sense you pay extra to actually use the park and tax payers are paying just enough to keep the park established. However, what's the extra cost in distributing the journal article? Hosting fees? A simple website where the paper author uploads a PDF? It seems like those costs are pretty small
• d33 11y ago
  I'd argue that it's not having to pay that is the problem alone; instead - the way they charge you an insane amount of money per paper. I wouldn't mind paying, say $1 monthly on entrance to have my park clean. Charging $10 per entry is crazy though.
• TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  >How many people read this research? 1% of America? If anything, it's 1% of the world. The problem is not limited to the US. And it's a very significant 1% which is one of the biggest - if not literally the biggest - drivers of the world economy. >The counter argument to this is you pay to use national parks even though you already pay for it. Parks have huge continuing expenses. They're also owned in trust for the public. Journal publishing has almost no expenses at all. It's pure privatised oligoply. It provides no useful public or private service of any kind. There is nothing academic publishers do that couldn't be done better in other ways.
  • x1798DE 11y ago
    > If anything, it's 1% of the world. The problem is not limited to the US. Probably it's not worth making this point, but I think that would almost certainly be a bigger, not smaller fraction of Americans, since I think Americans are more, not less, likely to read scientific research than the rest of the world.
  • ikeboy 11y ago
    >Journal publishing has almost no expenses at all. If their expenses of 60-80% of revenue is "almost nothing", surely their revenue is also "almost nothing", and therefore we shouldn't care about it.
    • acidflask 11y ago
      To cite just one example, Elsevier consistently reports over $1b/yr profit on $3b/yr revenue. Not exactly "almost nothing". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/mit-open-access/open-access-at-mit/mit-open-access-policy/publishers-and-the-mit-faculty-open-access-policy/elsevier-fact-sheet/ https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/mit-open-access/open-acc...
      • ikeboy 11y ago
        If $2b of costs is almost no expenses, then surely $1b of profit is as well. You can't have it both ways, downplaying their costs and complaining about their profit.
• frobozz 11y ago
  I certainly don't have a problem with the users of a service paying something to use that service, in order to save the rest of us a bit of money. That is how the postal system and a lot of public transport works (and, as you say, National Parks). What's actually ludicrous is that you pay private, profit making companies to allow you to read taxpayer-funded research. Moreover, taxpayer-funded bodies have to pay these companies to allow them to read taxpayer-funded research from other taxpayer-funded bodies. That is the epitome of private sector wastefulness spreading its tentacles into the public sector.
  • ikeboy 11y ago
    You haven't given any distinction. Do you not consider publishing a service?
    • frobozz 11y ago
      What do you mean? Of course publishing is a service. At what point did I claim otherwise? The point is that taxes pay for people produce the content, and to allow people to read the content. If the publication of the content were also a public service, then no-one would be syphoning off profit in the middle. All of the money taken by that service from the consumers would be rolled back into saving taxpayer money at some stage in the process.
      • ikeboy 11y ago
        So your problem is with for profit businesses being involved at any stage in the process? Suppose a park contracts with a company to provide food, and that company makes a profit; is that bad? We could also consider workers "making a profit" from their labor, and decree that government workers must make only as much money as the minimum to feed themselves; any more would be "syphoning off profit". I just don't see how you can make a principled distinction that says publishing margins of 30% are bad, but allows for subcontracting to private companies.
        • frobozz 11y ago
• deleted 11y ago
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• Protohedgehog 11y ago
  It's not necessarily about reading articles. It's about giving everyone the freedom and opportunity to do so if they wish. You might not want to read them now, but what if you became interested in physics, or a friend of family member became ill? You'd want to know more about these things from the research literature, and the current system denies the vast majority of people that opportunity. You don't even know if articles are any good or useful until you've paid. We recently published a paper that attempts to convey different needs for open access to research here: http://f1000research.com/articles/5-632/v1 http://f1000research.com/articles/5-632/v1
• chris_wot 11y ago
  Weird argument. If 1% of America is reading this research, then it is most likely because the research is locked behind paywalls where only those going to Universities can get access to the material. Of course, this whole argument implies that all the research produced is only being viewed by 1% of the population then much of it is worthless and never used, therefore the public funds put into using the research were largely wasted - which we know is definitely not true. And if only 1% of the population is viewing the material, then it seems a bit unlikely that it would be so highly profitable for people like Elsevier. I mean, this argument breaks down even further because if even only 1% more people were to use the research because it was free, the benefit to society would be worth many orders of magnitude more than the funds that would have been gained from selling the material. The final, fatal flaw in the argument, however is that the money paid into National Parks is given to the Government, who use it to pay for the upkeep of National Parks. The people who are charging to access research are doing so to make a profit and relying largely on research funded not by the publishers, but by the U.S. Government who give grants! They are hardly contributing their entire profits into research.
• leecarraher 11y ago
  The 1% that actually read stuff, are usually under some sort of group journal usage license like a university library, or large organization site license, so they usually aren't paying anyway. I think the biggest hurdle is that these decisions are usually only made (with the exception of the occasional individual $15 ieee article purchase ) by top level executives at the journal's and the "customer's" organizations, while the costs burden is pushed on to every one else at that organization. My fellow researchers firmly follow the, "citizens paid for it, we are gonna share it" mentality so all results and source material is made available for free online. if someone wants everything organized into a strict 10 page limit, they can have it, but they arent getting anything more than what everyone already has access too.
  • chatmasta 11y ago
    Maybe more than 1% would read the papers, if not for the paywall. The basis of your argument is likely due to simple confirmation bias. Sure, 1% read the papers, but only because 1% can read the papers. Who's to say nobody else would be interested if they could read them for free? Of course nobody will read something they know nothing about if they need to pay... But make it free, and they just might.
• jbmorgado 11y ago
  The counter argument to this is you pay to use national parks even though you already pay for it. This analogy is completely wrong. The money you pay in admission to the parks go towards the parks in order to maintain and improve the parks, even though you already do that with your taxes. The money you pay to scientific publications goes to the publisher alone, it does not, in any case, end up financing science.
  • ikeboy 11y ago
    If nobody paid, publishers wouldn't have revenue from access, and so would need to charge authors directly, which would make science costs go up.
    • p4bl0 11y ago
      That is not true, because it is possible to get rid of the publishers entirely. The only thing that would be needed are people in charge of formatting and such, because some fields do not use LaTeX yet (this need concerns mostly biology, chemistry, and medicine). But that could be easily covered by small local businesses for a teeny tiny fraction of the costs of current subscriptions. The other thing that costs money already exists: archives that take care of making papers available and preserve them for the future. These services would need to be reinforced but that cost is also ridiculous compared to what is currently spent as subscription (the operational cost of arXiv for example are only a bit more than what a mid sized university pays for Elsevier subscription alone…).
      • ikeboy 11y ago
        The large open access journals that don't have independent funding charge rates within the same order of magnitude. What evidence do you have that an order of magnitude reduction is actually possible at scale? How do you explain the expenses of both traditional publishers and open access ones, and how would you eliminate them?
        • p4bl0 11y ago
• SeanDav 11y ago
  > "The counter argument to this is you pay to use national parks even though you already pay for it." You would have a case if the publishers did not make huge profits from the research and contribute nothing back to the research. When you pay for access to a park, you know that money is going towards the running and improvement of the park.
  • ikeboy 11y ago
    Revenue goes towards publishing expenses. Why don't you consider their subsidization of publishing a contribution to the research?
    • SeanDav 11y ago
      They could publish online for much lower cost, under a CC licence. Current profits are extortionate, to say nothing about the bullying tactics employed by Elsevier, who abuse a monopoly and force libraries and other institutions to take a lot of publications they do not want to access those they do want.
      • ikeboy 11y ago
        The distribution isn't where the cost comes from, it's editing, reviewing, and so on.
        • p4bl0 11y ago
          That is false. Reviewing does not cost a cent to publishers, it is entirely the work of the scientific community.
          • ikeboy 11y ago
            Someone paid by the publisher needs to look at every paper. Some journals calculate internal costs of up to $40,000 per paper (see http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676 http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-scie...). You seem to be skeptical of such claims, but simply asserting that the expenses don't exist isn't enough.
• shade23 11y ago
  >How many people read this research? 1% of America? I disagree with this.You need to realise these numbers are because it is behind a fortified wall.There have been several times i've ended up on Elsevier/IEEE and could not read things because of the registration involved.Now i dont even bother looking at those urls(except if I am interested enough to go via SciHub). And I am quite sure there are several others like me too. People like to read articles,and I would prefer reading the actual paper than 10 other news articles describing the new technology too. Access to Information determines the number of people who access it.The numbers might be lesser earlier,but I assure you the growth would be exponential. Its just painful to see how delayed/selective interactions are in the "scientific papers world" when it would be possible for massive interaction which could lead to an "Academic Boom"(horrible pun but you should get the point).
• dougmccune 11y ago
  I think a closer argument is the textbook content that professors create. Writing a textbook is something that is often done on tenured professor's salaried time, essentially paid for by their university. And in the case of public universities that's public money just like research grant money. And yet you never hear the argument that all books academics write as part of their job as tenured professors should be free.
• snowwrestler 11y ago
  Paying for entry to national parks is a terrible idea too.