3 ms·

>Publishers acquire this research free of charge Except of course they don't. They provide publishing services, which cost them between 60-80% of the revenue e

by ikeboy 11y ago

>Publishers acquire this research free of charge Except of course they don't. They provide publishing services, which cost them between 60-80% of the revenue each paper bring in (based on profit margins between 20-40%). Authors sign over their copyright in exchange for this consideration. (If they didn't get anything, the copyright assignment wouldn't be valid.) > leading journals have stepped forward to make new findings free to all. By charging authors upfront. >Publishers do add value, but that value doesn’t justify the cost or the lost opportunities for those who can’t (or can’t fully) access the research. This doesn't make sense. "Groceries do add value, but that doesn't justify the cost or lost opportunities for those that can't afford food". The solution to people not being able to access essentials is not outlawing anyone charging for it. It's subsidizing the cost for everyone to buy it, or making a government-run version that provides it for free. If you want everyone to be able to eat, you give them food stamps (or make sure they have enough money by raising the minimum wage, whatever), don't get upset at companies that provide value but also make a profit. If you can do it for less, go ahead.

p4bl0 11y ago
Have you ever published a paper in an academic venue? What publishers offered was delivering paper versions of articles to your local research library. Now they only host PDFs online. Apart from that their added-value work is negligible. The biggest improvement I've seen by a publisher of one of my papers was changing "Sec." to "Sect." when I was referencing section, and putting page number in blue rather than black (true story). Anyway nowadays when a paper is accessible directly from a public repository, it is that version which will be used most often, and it includes literally zero work from the publisher. All the real work is done by the authors, and by the reviewers, who are other researchers doing their normal job (i.e., they're not paid specifically to review papers, and more importantly not paid by publishers). The only thing that publishers provide is reputation/prestige, and that's only because of inertia, and it's difficult to change because they own the titles of journals they publish. That's one of the numerous reasons why bibliometrics is an entirely bad idea and is counter-productive for science. Also, not all open access journal are charging author, that is a lie installed by publishers lobbying (and this is how they actually spend money). You can research "diamond open access" or "overlay journal" for some examples of economical models where journal are high quality, open access and free to submit to.
- ikeboy 11y ago
  >Also, not all open access journal are charging author, that is a lie installed by publishers lobbying (and this is how they actually spend money). You can research "diamond open access" or "overlay journal" for some examples of economical models where journal are high quality, open access and free to submit to. Those all seem to be sponsored. That won't scale to every paper unless some large organization funds it. The biggest open access journals all charge. > it includes literally zero work from the publisher. As long as their expenses are >60% of revenue, I find this hard to believe. If you think they're wasteful, you can run your own and try to spend less, but denying their costs won't convince me. >The only thing that publishers provide is reputation/prestige Like I said, this model doesn't fit with the numbers we have about their margins. I'd at least expect over 50% profit margin if they were merely extracting rent, and probably closer to 90%.
  - p4bl0 11y ago
    > Those all seem to be sponsored. Even if that is true I would rather see public money sponsoring real open access journals than spend paying author fees and subscription to closed access and hybrid journals. > As long as their expenses are >60% of revenue, What I truly question is the nature of these expenses. From my point of view inside academia in the field of computer science, and knowing a lot of people in other fields of academia, the actual work put by publishers in the final product that is a published scientific paper is close to zero (except for those fields where there is layout work because they do not use readymade LaTeX documentclasses).
    - ikeboy 11y ago
      >Even if that is true I would rather see public money sponsoring real open access journals than spend paying author fees and subscription to closed access and hybrid journals. That's a legitimate argument. Shifting around who pays what may very well result in positive externalities. But merely complaining about publisher profits while ignoring their costs doesn't work.
  - monocasa 11y ago
themartorana 11y ago
SciHub can and does do it for less. It's the whole point of the article.
- ikeboy 11y ago
  SciHub piggybacks on the publishers' work. Stealing the output of a company and giving it away does not mean you can do their work for less.
  - riscy 11y ago
    It's the researcher who produced and typeset the article; the publisher does nothing more than hosting PDFs sent directly from the authors after they passed peer review, which is not something the publisher is involved with.
    - ikeboy 11y ago
      This is false. If all they did was host pdfs everyone would just use arxiv. 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... for a good overview of all the sides here.

by ikeboy 11y ago

p4bl0 11y ago

Have you ever published a paper in an academic venue? What publishers offered was delivering paper versions of articles to your local research library. Now they only host PDFs online. Apart from that their added-value work is negligible. The biggest improvement I've seen by a publisher of one of my papers was changing "Sec." to "Sect." when I was referencing section, and putting page number in blue rather than black (true story). Anyway nowadays when a paper is accessible directly from a public repository, it is that version which will be used most often, and it includes literally zero work from the publisher. All the real work is done by the authors, and by the reviewers, who are other researchers doing their normal job (i.e., they're not paid specifically to review papers, and more importantly not paid by publishers). The only thing that publishers provide is reputation/prestige, and that's only because of inertia, and it's difficult to change because they own the titles of journals they publish. That's one of the numerous reasons why bibliometrics is an entirely bad idea and is counter-productive for science. Also, not all open access journal are charging author, that is a lie installed by publishers lobbying (and this is how they actually spend money). You can research "diamond open access" or "overlay journal" for some examples of economical models where journal are high quality, open access and free to submit to.

ikeboy 11y ago
>Also, not all open access journal are charging author, that is a lie installed by publishers lobbying (and this is how they actually spend money). You can research "diamond open access" or "overlay journal" for some examples of economical models where journal are high quality, open access and free to submit to. Those all seem to be sponsored. That won't scale to every paper unless some large organization funds it. The biggest open access journals all charge. > it includes literally zero work from the publisher. As long as their expenses are >60% of revenue, I find this hard to believe. If you think they're wasteful, you can run your own and try to spend less, but denying their costs won't convince me. >The only thing that publishers provide is reputation/prestige Like I said, this model doesn't fit with the numbers we have about their margins. I'd at least expect over 50% profit margin if they were merely extracting rent, and probably closer to 90%.
- p4bl0 11y ago
  > Those all seem to be sponsored. Even if that is true I would rather see public money sponsoring real open access journals than spend paying author fees and subscription to closed access and hybrid journals. > As long as their expenses are >60% of revenue, What I truly question is the nature of these expenses. From my point of view inside academia in the field of computer science, and knowing a lot of people in other fields of academia, the actual work put by publishers in the final product that is a published scientific paper is close to zero (except for those fields where there is layout work because they do not use readymade LaTeX documentclasses).
  - ikeboy 11y ago
    >Even if that is true I would rather see public money sponsoring real open access journals than spend paying author fees and subscription to closed access and hybrid journals. That's a legitimate argument. Shifting around who pays what may very well result in positive externalities. But merely complaining about publisher profits while ignoring their costs doesn't work.
- monocasa 11y ago

themartorana 11y ago

SciHub can and does do it for less. It's the whole point of the article.

ikeboy 11y ago
SciHub piggybacks on the publishers' work. Stealing the output of a company and giving it away does not mean you can do their work for less.
- riscy 11y ago
  It's the researcher who produced and typeset the article; the publisher does nothing more than hosting PDFs sent directly from the authors after they passed peer review, which is not something the publisher is involved with.
  - ikeboy 11y ago
    This is false. If all they did was host pdfs everyone would just use arxiv. 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... for a good overview of all the sides here.