5 ms·
Seems excellent but I'm afraid the EU will just pay a sweet bundle of money to the publishers for the privilege instead of making it a law. Either way I hope it
by kriro 10y ago
Seems excellent but I'm afraid the EU will just pay a sweet bundle of money to the publishers for the privilege instead of making it a law.
Either way I hope it also extends to the member states level eventually. The circus of avoiding conflict between EU funding and member state funding is often quite amusing so this will be interesting.
It feels almost ethically self evident that any research funded by citizens in any way should be made available to said citizens (and that's more or less 100% of research in Europe). Lets step in that direction.
- ikeboy 10y agoWhat would the law say, and how would it prevent publishers from demanding money to publish now that their other sources of income have been cut off?
- lrem 10y agoBut they are already cashing in for publishing anything, with additional small charges like few hundred bucks for going over the page limit and big charges like a couple thousand for making the article openly accessible.
- ikeboy 10y ago" big charges like a couple thousand for making the article openly accessible." Yes, if you don't want them let them make money off your work, they won't subsidize publication and you'll need to pay. No law can change basic economics.
- Kliment 10y agoFuck them. Publication costs nothing. All they're selling is prestige, and the cost of that will be dramatically adjusted downwards if there is political will to do so.
- lrem 10y agoYet somehow there are so many platforms that will happily subsidise open publication without even taking the initial thousand bucks for letting me in, like Medium, Wordpress, Blogger... Seriously, the only reason why academic publishers can charge anything is their established position, where they are a proxy for gauging researcher's output by administration. Peer reviews are done by volunteers, discovery is provided by Google Scholar and everybody uses PDF anyways (usually printing it out, still orders of magnitude faster than fetching from a library).
- ikeboy 10y agoThose have nowhere near the costs of academic publishers, which are usually in the thousands per paper. There's a reason papers aren't published on medium.