6 ms·

>>Should publisher's work be free? I think not. What exact work these publishers are doing? How much are they demanding for that? Who is funding the research?

• refurb 10y ago
  What exact work these publishers are doing? Typesetting, third party review, offering visibility in a high quality journal? The point is nothing is stopping scientists from publishing in other, open source journals. But they don't. That means these journals offer something of value to them.
  • morgante 10y ago
    > That means these journals offer something of value to them. Prestige, obviously. The other services are marginally valuable. Honestly, I wish a big foundation would agree to simply underwrite any such costs (to remove these as an objection). The whole value of publishers is in their accumulated brand value. A brand value which they did not build themselves but instead gathered from decades of harvesting public resources.
    • refurb 10y ago
      Public resources? How do you figure? Not all research public is a public resource. Pharmaceutical companies publish, as do private foundations. Anyways, if the research was funded through public money, it gets published for free anyways.
      • morgante 10y ago
        > Anyways, if the research was funded through public money, it gets published for free anyways. It does? I'm genuinely curious. The vast majority of research is funded with public money (to some extent). Where is all this publicly-funded research published?
        • refurb 10y ago
          http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed Now, there is a delay (1 year?) between when it's published in a journal and when it's freely released, which I can understand bothers people, but it does eventually make it's way out to the public domain.
          • morgante 10y ago
            This seems to be only NIH-funded medical research. While it's nice to see, that's far from the only federally funded research.
            • refurb 10y ago
              It was expanded back in 2013 to all federal organizations that spend more than $100M in research. That was just an example link.
              • tmptmp 10y ago
                >>It was expanded back in 2013 to all federal organizations that spend more than $100M in research. Why some arbitrary figure like $100M? why not $1M or $1K or for that matter even $1? It should be other way round, if any research gets any funding (even $1 or 1 cent) then also the papers coming out of that research should be immediately released to public else they should not accept that grant/funding. The journals should not get a free ride for 1 year or so.
              • rsfern 10y ago
                It was not expanded. i think you're referring to the FASTR bill that has not yet (but hopefully will soon be) passed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Access_to_Science_and_Technology_Research_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Access_to_Science_and_T...
  • TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
    >Typesetting Trivial >third party review Trivial, and happens just fine without publisher "help" >offering visibility in a high quality journal? Most journals are not "high quality." They're often very niche efforts, sometimes started and run as an easy way to get publication credits outside the handful of prestige publications. Ambitious academics know that one way to raise your profile is to organise your own conference - and ask a publisher to collect and print the proceedings for you.
    • refurb 10y ago
      Trivial Obviously that's your opinion, but since when does the effort it takes to create something matter about the price? It's pretty trivial to move product from a factory to a retail store, yet people have no problem paying for that. And again, if it's trivial, then there is nothing stopping anyone from starting their own journal. But amazingly, nobody has done that. What's the saying about "find out why the fence is there before you tear it down"? Most journals are not "high quality. Who cares about most journals? Nobody reads them anyways. I'm talking Nature, Science, etc.
      • xyience 10y ago
        The effort to create something has always factored into the price. It's not the only factor, but it's there. Additionally, I take the main point of the response of "trivial" (in the case of typesetting it's often just providing a bundle of extra tex files to recompile your paper with) as less a remark on the price, and more a remark on the work. The question you answered was what work the publishers are doing, with the underlying qualifier of [to justify/correlate with their price] and the direct followup you didn't speculate on asking about what they charge for each item of work. It's like answering "what do doctors do to command such a high price?" with "scribble on a piece of paper". OK, let's assume that's really a good description of the work they provide, how much specifically do they charge for it? The full fee? Great, this exercise wasn't helpful at all. Can we break the work down into smaller units and try to estimate costs for each, whether those costs are "reasonable" or "unreasonable"? When I pay $30 for a single paper, what parts of the work endeavor does each dollar go to? We can even take into account fuzzy second-order fees like "well you're really paying back into the massive amount of work they did beforehand so they can scribble the right things now" when we're out of other ideas, but I can't imagine much of that $30 going specifically to the work of "typesetting" because it's so trivial.
  • ptaipale 10y ago
    Typesetting by publisher is not valuable at this age. Elsevier seems keen to not have third parties review the publications. And visibility, same thing. They try to prevent it. Yes, scientists should publish elsewhere; the contracts currently prevent them as Elsevier has power to stop them through their entrenched legacy position.
    • dceddia 10y ago
      What prevents a group of scientists from setting up doingscience.io or whatever, and publishing their results to a big shared blog? Do the contracts stipulate that their findings can only be published in specific paid journals?
      • sharpneli 10y ago
        Money. Research grants are given mostly by amount of publications in well known journals. If they just start a blog then they won't get further grants and have to change careers. The effect of Impact Factor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor) in academic grants is ridiculously high. So in the end it's not the scientists who can make the switch. It's the people who pay the scientists.
        • ashitlerferad 10y ago
          Who are these people and how can people contact them?
          • tmptmp 10y ago
            These are mainly the administrators (read clerks) who are in the charge of the funding purse(s). You can contact them via your senators and other elected members. Tell your representatives the following: The clerks that you have put in charge of funding our tax-money-filled purses for scientific research are just a bunch of uneducated or worse yet ill-educated fellows who do not understand even an iota of academics especially in the STEM areas. So they just rely on a bunch of very coarse proxy numbers (e.g. shitty impact factors) to decide funding. So please remove these clerks from these positions. We can and must install a better and more open system for reviewing where well known scientists/academicians can be invited to participate in the decision making process. Open access journals is one such great way to start. See what is being done by great academicians like Prof. Sir Timothy Gowers and Prof. Donald Knuth are doing for this cause [1], [2]. You may contact these people and get their advice in this matter. Signed. Your fellow citizen, a concerned taxpayer and a voter of USA. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Gowers#Elsevier_boycott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Gowers#Elsevier_boycot... [2] http://thecostofknowledge.com/#list http://thecostofknowledge.com/#list
  • chrismonsanto 10y ago
    My experience in publishing (in CS) is that the publisher does not offer assistance in typesetting. Additionally reviewers are not paid for their effort, and are not affiliated with the publisher--they do it out of a sense of duty / professional advancement. The journals offer something of value because they provide high-quality taxpayer-funded research. The publisher is nothing more than a middleman, who should be cut out of the equation.
    • randyrand 10y ago
      Not all of them are taxpayer funded. That's a blatent lie.
    • merraksh 10y ago
      Not sure why you're being downvoted, what you say is similar for applied math. Since a couple of years ago some publishers are asking the LaTeX source and the figures to avoid their own typesetting (save for the journal's LaTeX style). Journals do publish a lot of work by academicians, many of them funded, in the US, by NSF grants (taxpayer money).