24 ms·

We've failed: open access is winning and we must change our approach

• amigoingtodie 9y ago
  Are the pursuits of knowledge and profit in conflict?
  • lisper 9y ago
    Open access to knowledge is in conflict with the pursuit of profit because knowledge-asymmetry is easy to monetize.
  • koiz 9y ago
    Yes. They have been for decades. Thankfully the internet created another door, but we'll see how long that lasts...
    • SmellTheGlove 9y ago
      > Thankfully the internet created another door, but we'll see how long that lasts... Can't put the toothpaste back into the tube. The interesting thing about the Internet is that its creators were either unaware, didn't care, or more likely, didn't see as negative (regarding the economic impacts) they were creating something that would eliminate scarcity of information. Everyone else observing either shared that lack of awareness in slowing the train, or was not able to foresee the practical impacts. Any attempt to put the brakes on now is going to be a net economic loss. Profit-seeking entities have an interest in preserving the internet as-is, even if they make occasional short term decisions counter to that (like abandoning net neutrality). The handful of industries that profit entirely off of information scarcity will either adjust or go away. They really should spend their money finding new value streams rather than fighting piracy. That's not winnable.
      • teddyh 9y ago
        > Can't put the toothpaste back into the tube. Some seem to think it’s possible: The Digital Imprimatur (https://fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/ https://fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/) was written in 2003, and it’s mostly gotten worse since then; see The coming war on general-purpose computing (https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html).
        • SmellTheGlove 9y ago
          They've had almost 15 years since they published. Almost a full generation. An eternity in internet time. Wait until our kids get their hands on this shit. They were born without the notion of information scarcity. Speaking of Internet Time, remember when Swatch tried to do that? :) Heh, I don't know what made me think of that, but man that was fun.
          • marcosdumay 9y ago
            > They've had almost 15 years since they published. And the unlockable computers are already becoming commonplace, there are already many countries where using a debugger to access locked data is a crime, and the government is already watching us all - unwilling to actually act over that information, but who knows what way they'll go in the future? We are in the heat of that exact war, and the winning side is far from defined.
            • SmellTheGlove 9y ago
              Good points. I'm a bit of an optimist on the subject, but everything you're saying is true.
      • Angostura 9y ago
        And once the publishing, movie and music industries have 'gone away, together with the authors, artist and producers who rely on them for a living, what kind of world will that be?
        • SmellTheGlove 9y ago
          There's a demand for content. Some of the distribution value proposition is in question. I don't think entire industries will disappear, but I do think there will be winners and losers based on who adjusts. As someone else in this thread said - you gotta be better than free. That's true in many cases. Music is a great example - it's more convenient to buy or subscribe than it is to pirate it.
        • tom_mellior 9y ago
          Scientific publishing specificially (the topic here) will go on as before. Unlike the other industries you mention, the creators are not paid from the money collected by the publisher. They are paid by their own employers. They get paid the exact same salary whether they put a free PDF of their work on arXiv or get it published behind a paywall. Scientists have no interest whatsoever in paywalls, except that they want to be published, and historically the companies with the paywalls were the only way to get published.
  • quickben 9y ago
    Nah, the high-margin vs "what the market can bear in terms of margin", are in conflict. Textbooks reaching $200 is the problem.
  • deleted 9y ago
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• fiatjaf 9y ago
  The subject is not new at all, and this is just opinion. Why does it deserve more attention than an HN comment?
  • deleted 9y ago
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  • loup-vaillant 9y ago
    1. It has an abstract and a long list of references. 2. It is much longer than an HN comment. (Not saying those are valid reasons…)
  • adamnemecek 9y ago
    It's on the website of a company that has some clout in the academic publishing industry.
    • dougmccune 9y ago
      To be clear, this is an opinion piece published in a Wiley journal, not authored by Wiley
  • daenney 9y ago
    I'm not aware of anything in the HN guidelines stating that matters that have been discussed before, opinion or not, should not be posted or are not worthy of further attention or discussion? If it's not interesting to people it'll probably never make is out of newest. By now it's on the front page, that should tell you something about the interest HN has in this topic.
    • fiatjaf 9y ago
      I wasn't saying that is wrong that this should be discussed here or that it should be flagged or whatever, I was only sincerely questioning the people who upvoted it and why they did it.
• neilk 9y ago
  If anyone is confused like I was: "Gold open access": publish paper in a publicly accessible academic journal. "Green open access": self-publish. For instance, throw it on a website, and allow it to be indexed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access
  • CamperBob2 9y ago
    That was confusing, thanks. I thought "Gold" meant "Put up a paywall and charge lots of money," "Green" meant "Put up a paywall and charge moderate amounts of money," and "Black" meant "Hoist the Jolly Roger and don't charge anything at all."
    • pjc50 9y ago
      Gold means the author pays the cost of publishing, potentially several thousand dollars. Green means "arxiv": the author uploads a "preprint" version to a website. The "official" version is in a conventional reader-pays journal. "Black" does indeed mean sci-hub piracy.
  • dankohn1 9y ago
    Thank you. It was an embarrassingly badly written article, not to even define the basic terms.
    • oaeide 9y ago
      The author is allowed to expect a certain domain knowledge. For example, an article about an advanced physics topic is not expected to explain Newton's laws.
      • dankohn1 9y ago
        Agreed. I should have been more clear on my criticism. If the author had the goal of convincing people beyond their existing audience then explaining their terms would have helped significantly.
• Aloha 9y ago
  One of my frustrations is that scientific papers decades old are still locked behind a paywall - so while I might voluntarily donate something if I find the content useful - I'm not for example willing to pay 40 dollars to find out if an article that is 60 years old is interesting or useful - but I might pay 1-2 dollars after the fact. I totally get paywalling say.. anything newer than 5 years - I don't get the point of paywalling something 40-50-60 years old.
  • dnautics 9y ago
    You're not the target market. A person with a corporate credit card is willing to pay that much to read it, in certain industries.
    • pishpash 9y ago
      Any sane bean counter should be able to work out a way to segment the market, like every subscription service ever, but it would require distributor content control, like DRM or streaming.
  • nonbel 9y ago
    The old stuff is worth much more than new, quality has dropped a lot since the 1940s as research becomes more and more industrialized.
    • jacquesm 9y ago
      Unless of course you are at the edge of some field. Then the new stuff is a must.
      • nonbel 9y ago
        No, I mean the vast majority of what is getting published these days does not contain useful information (very often it is worse than that, and is misleading). Reading papers from back then, almost every paper was worthwhile in some way. I think it also has to do with the ease of publishing.
• wyc 9y ago
  Information economics seem to be playing out exactly as expected. The price of a good is reverting to its cost of production--near $0 for copying bytes. You can't stop the rock. In Information Rules, Shapiro & Varian argue that if you're selling an information product, all that you can charge for is the value that you add on top of the information, such as convenience, freshness, etc. It's best to assume the information itself is free.
  • tzs 9y ago
    > The price of a good is reverting to its cost of production--near $0 for copying bytes. That needs the word "marginal" inserted just before the word "cost".
    • etplayer 9y ago
      Marginal economics seems to be rather popular, but I'm still a stickler for classical ideas of value personally.
      • tptacek 9y ago
        Well then, the price of a good is nowhere near reverting to its cost of production, which is obviously far higher than the cost of the Nth copy of that good.
    • CaptSpify 9y ago
      Can you explain why?
      • wyc 9y ago
        When you're making a new movie, the production of the master copy can cost millions of dollars. Same thing with software products, songs, and digital photos. However, making a digital copy after that is very cheap. Therefore, it's better to say that the marginal production cost moves towards zero instead of the total production cost, which would include the master copy cost.
    • 9y ago
• jmcgough 9y ago
  Open access journals have failed in part because they lack the prestige of top tier journals like cell or nature
  • loup-vaillant 9y ago
    So, network effects? How familiar.
    • Angostura 9y ago
      Not really a network effect. More a reputation effect.
      • loup-vaillant 9y ago
        Journal's got reputation, so everybody reads it, and everybody tries to publish in it, so journal gets many good submissions that help maintain its reputation. New open publication journal gets no reputation, so nobody reads it, and nobody submits to it, so it gets nothing, and can't ramp up its reputation. Network effect.
        • Angostura 9y ago
          I disagree. The two are related, but not synonymous. The classic network effect example is the telephone - the system is is of zero utility if no-one you know uses the system. Reputation effects are more decoupled and fuzzy. A tiny niche journal with small readership can nonetheless have a high reputation if it only publishes highly regarded articles.
      • mathgenius 9y ago
        Reputation = network.
  • Thriptic 9y ago
    Exactly this. Want people to publish in open access journals? Make high impact journals open access. People are going to publish in whichever journal most helps their career, not whichever journal has the best licensing scheme. The reason traditional publishing has failed is because even at the highest tier universities there is not universal access to content or even access to the majority of content. Sure my University will buy me whatever paper I want, but I don't want to wait a day to get a paper and then discover that it is not actually pertinent to my work when I can get it on scihub in five minutes without having to fill out a request form. Until there are bundled services a la Spotify which provide access to almost everything, scihub will continue to flourish. The issue has very little to do with price and much more to do with convenience to the researcher.
• solatic 9y ago
  It's not that complicated. The author seems to think that academic journals were somehow high-quality products that were co-opted by privacy. The music industry also, once upon a time, thought that offering disks in record stores was a high-quality offering. Music pirates forced the music industry to realize that they were charging too much for user-hostile formats. Publishing pirates ought to force the publishing industry to realize that they are charging too much for user-hostile formats, too. The music industry started to win back market-share from pirates when they understood that they had to compete with pirate offerings and offer a better, higher-quality product. The results were iTunes, then Spotify and similar competitors (Google Music etc.). The publishing industry ought to be no exception.
  • trothamel 9y ago
    I'm not sure the academic publishing industry is going to get what little goodwill the music industry has. With iTunes and so on, there's at least the idea that some small fraction of the money spent is going back to the artists. That doesn't seem to be the case with academic publishing, where you have these purely rent-seeking corporations. Why would I want to give Elsevier my money, when the authors of the paper don't get any of it? That's the problem academic publishing has, making it hard to recognize sci-hub as illegitimate. (One of my happiest academic publishing experiences was when I wrote a paper while working for the US government, which meant there was no copyright for the publisher to insist on stealing from me.)
    • rjsw 9y ago
      I would prefer to see the reviewers of a paper getting paid than the authors. I was a founder of a startup in the 80s that was part funded by Elsevier. I spent a fair bit of time discussing the possible impact of computer networks and graphical displays on their business model with their then CTO.
      • majewsky 9y ago
        Please go on. Your anecdote stopped before any of the interesting parts. Did the then-CTO not see any of this coming, or did he/she just think that they couldn't change anything one way or the other?
• infogulch 9y ago
  The content distribution problem is capital-s Solved. The reason why publishers are floundering is because their product doesn't add value anymore. As a group they have slowly been cutting out all the value-adds and buckling down on only one thing: distribution. Distribution is not valuable anymore because distribution has no marginal cost. This is classic rent-seeking. Cut your costs so far that your business does nothing, nothing except extract rent out of a pre-existing monopoly. This lasts exactly as long as it takes the market to make a competitor. How do you win against free? Be better than free.
  • tpeo 9y ago
    Zero marginal cost doesn't imply that the product or service in question has no value. Rather, it implies that producing has no value to the firm. But it can still have value to potential consumers. As an example, take any market with natural monopolies. It costs nearly nothing to a company working with electric power distribution to serve an additional client in comparison to their fixed costs. But the client still wants their electricity.
    • pishpash 9y ago
      It costs money to maintain the distribution network to every additional client. But then they are regulated to (theoretically) cost just enough to ensure such goals. If the network is self-maintaining and already serves every client, then that business would be over, too.
      • sklivvz1971 9y ago
        It costs much more money to produce the electricity they use!
    • infogulch 9y ago
      Publishers don't have a natural monopoly, just a circumstantial monopoly. (Yes I just made that up.) That produces a completely different implication: Zero marginal cost means that a competitor can come along at any time and charge a zero price. This is the power of advancing information technology: it empowers people with little to no capital & operational budget to have a proportionately huge effect on any information system that has zero marginal cost.
• deleted 9y ago
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• CamperBob2 9y ago
  "After all, the pirates have long since been chased out of the music business (Gapper, 2017)." The pirates were doing the chasing. Without the pirates, we wouldn't have multiple competing services that grant unlimited access to practically every note of commercial recorded music for a very modest amount of money. If scientific publishing had a Spotify or Apple Music, then there would be no need for a sci-hub. Your move, Wiley.
• CryoLogic 9y ago
  I spent over $1,000 one quarter on books because I couldn't buy ANY of my books used as they all had half of the content in one-time online codes. Even worse, the online codes expire every quarter.
  • HarryHirsch 9y ago
    Complain to your university's administration that the faculty is outsourcing assessment to the textbook company. The access codes are a racket, but they are a convenient racket, because the university doesn't have to hire extra faculty or assistants for grading tests and running tutorials, teaching faculty is seriously overburdened. It's really bad and has gotten worse in the last 20 years. This is a standard text for advanced undergraduate organic chemistry: https://www.amazon.com/-/dp/0387683461 https://www.amazon.com/-/dp/0387683461 USD 35 on Amazon plus another USD 35 for its sister volume, good for all Orgo courses that an undergraduate might choose to take. A new edition would come out every 8 - 10 years. Solid. Good addition to the personal library when working in the field. Over 2500 pages altogether. Whoever says that isn't a fair deal is lying. This is the slim-down-rip-off introductory textbook edition: https://www.amazon.com/-/dp/0073402745/ https://www.amazon.com/-/dp/0073402745/ USD 268, but you get an access code. And a new edition seemingly every other year, as if the content in introductory courses changed that fast. It's a useless piece of dead tree, never to be looked at again once the course is over. It's the students' turn to revolt. The situation has been intolerable for a long time.
• snthd 9y ago
  Can we not just have the law changed and buy them all out? Like ending slavery.
• scottlegrand2 9y ago
  1. Go to the library of a public university 2. Download all the articles you want to a USB stick and print them at work. 3. Profit!!! Downvoted? I thought that this was relevant to the whole publisher issue myself. They provide zero incremental value and serve as little more than incremental friction towards accessing their content freely. Notice that step 2 was not upload to scihub. Peer review, the last thing that they did provide, seems to be undergoing disruption by crowdsourced attempts at replicating results.
  • mkl 9y ago
    1. You usually need to be a student or staff member to be able to do that. 2. Few universities have access to all journals - it's too expensive.
    • scottlegrand2 9y ago
      Not at state university campuses. I do this all the time at UC campuses. In fact I've been doing it for the better part of two decades since I left academia. And if I wanted to pay $60 or so annually, I could even borrow books. Ironically, I've worked with academia and government labs on two major projects and because I don't have an official academic email address, I can't even get a researchgate account without paying.
  • ufo 9y ago
    Peer review is already mostly done by volunteer researchers and there are a bunch of nonprofit journals out there that organize peer review without passing it on to a for-profit journal. The only value that the for profit journals still provide is the prestige of the journal, which has built up over the years.
  • wavegeek 9y ago
    > Download all the articles you want Problem 1: 5 hours round trip Problem 2: they only have about 2/3 of the papers I want. Problem 3: I save what I need and get home and start reading. Then there's another layer in the citation tree. Oh well, go in tomorrow, another 5 hours, and get that one, maybe. Or, to on scihub for the research we taxpayers paid for already.
• unixhero 9y ago
  Fuck yeah. This is fantastic.
• jly 9y ago
  Sci-hub has been a total game changer. Plug in a DOI, get a paper. No accounts/tracking, no payment, no looking up the journal and their access model. Just research. The simplicity of use and ease of access is unparalleled. I'm not a working scientist - I have no paid-for University access to a variety of journals or other such connections, nor do I know the intricate details of how research is published. What I do know is that I'm a citizen helping to fund much of this work, and access to primary literature is critically important to make informed decisions about our future. The academics are paid a salary to produce findings, not to sell individual copies (unlike the music industry comparisons). While I'm willing to pay something, I can't be expected to pay the huge costs to access individual papers that are demanded today. Open access journals like PLOS are fantastic, but it's an unfortunate reality that much of the quality research is published on platforms that charge $30 for a paper. Until this changes, sci-hub is my answer.
  • pishpash 9y ago
    It costs some money to get a DOI. Publishers can still be content aggregators and indexers, or curators. Sci-hub is merely an archive.
    • jly 9y ago
      I agree there is value added by curation. But today, academic publishing is an industry worth over $10b, and they don't actually pay for the original access or license of the content or the editing and peer-review. Publishers do add value but not to the extent of the cost that's passed on to the public today.
    • sillysaurus3 9y ago
      Paying $30 to merely look at a paper that may or may not be valuable is ridiculous no matter how you slice it.
      • closeparen 9y ago
        You aren't meant to pay the $30, you're meant to be inside the firewall at an institution.
• dmitriid 9y ago
  > brought forth a roar of policies and mandates that aim to oblige authors to change their publishing habits Right. Blame the authors. Not, say Elsevier, who demands authors remove their own research from their own sites and charges exorbitant prices for access to journals. > Now, some European countries are trying a new approach: to demand of the major publishers nationwide open access contracts, such as Projekt DEAL in Germany Indeed. Because it's not the authors who are to blame. - In July 2015, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) announced a plan to start boycotting Elsevier, which refused to negotiate on any Open Access policy for Dutch universities - In December 2016, Nature Publishing Group reported that academics in Germany, Peru and Taiwan are to lose access to Elsevier journals as negotiations had broken down with the publisher etc etc. etc. "What I find startling ... [that] 15 years on from the Budapest Open Access Declaration, a pirate site is needed at all." asks the author of the article. Why, indeed. > Sci-Hub, which is self-reporting more than 60 million articles freely available (Sci-Hub, 2017) and could have harvested nearly all scholarly literature (Himmelstein, Romeo, McLaughlin, Greshake, & Greene, 2017) – if true, Sci-Hub has single-handedly won the race to make all journal articles open access. So... WHY IS THIS A BAD THING? > Set against this are the combined efforts of stakeholders in scholarly communications who, after two decades, have managed only to get around half the world's research articles open, with the rest still behind a paywall 3–4 years post-publication WHY ARE THEY SET AGAINST THIS? > For books, despite initiatives like Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN), Knowledge Unlatched, and Open Book Publishers, progress has been glacial. At the time of writing, there are just over 8,000 titles listed in the Directory of Open Access Books (http://www.doabooks.org/ http://www.doabooks.org/), which – considering that Springer alone offers nearly 280,000 titles from its online bookshop – suggests that the proportion of books published open access has yet to reach 2%. "What I find startling ... [that] 15 years on from the Budapest Open Access Declaration, a pirate site is needed at all." asks the author of the article. .... and then he goes on blame authors, and only authors. > On the author side, peer review management, copyediting, and language services could be offered along with services to promote the publications and make them more accessible to non-technical audiences. Peer review is already done mostly for free. Why does he keep blaming the authors? Surprisingly, after spending the entire article vilifying the authors, the author of the article reaches this conclusion: " Critically, only one actor is needed to start this process of unbundling: the publisher. In making a basic, legal version free for anyone to read, gratis open access is achieved at a stroke, and it would start to make the pirates redundant." orly?
• analognoise 9y ago
  Pay to read an article? No, but I'd pay to talk to somebody who understood it, or who could answer questions about it. Is that a viable extra service that the publishers could move into?
• moyix 9y ago
  The repeated use of the word "pirate" here is absurd. From a moral standpoint, the argument against piracy is that it deprives creators of their livelihood. In scientific publishing, creators (and even reviewers!) are not compensated by publishers, and "piracy" actually helps their careers (this is why scientists are, in general, so strongly in favor of Sci-hub). But by abusing emotionally laden language and false comparisons with the music industry, the author hopes to win sympathy for an industry that, honestly, needs to radically change or die.
  • deleted 9y ago
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  • pelario 9y ago
    Also: piracy in music is more bounded because distributors have adapted to add value for users, at a reasonable price, sharing some revenue with the creators. (I'm thinking Spotify, YouTube, etc)
  • Iv 9y ago
    A few years ago, I wanted to switch my CS specialty from computer vision to bioinformatics and biology simulation. I have always been intrested in optimization, often wrote GPU code, found biology much more rewarding than augmented reality. A good researcher in the field was generous enough to guide me through the process and gave me a list of basic and also cutting edge articles that I should understand to be useful in the field. Coming from CS, I expected the literature to be basically free to download from researchers webpages. Boy was I wrong. The guy sent me a few copies, I was at the time also working close to a uni so I leeched a few from their library access, but this was a new field for me: every article rests on well-known conclusions explained in another article so I needed a ton of references, each bringing other references. Exactly like when you start reading an article in wikipedia on a subject you don't know. At one point I just felt ashamed of asking articles after articles and my library (that was not specialized in biology) only had half the articles I needed. I considered paying for them, but I needed probably at least 200 references and each was in 30 dollars range. I quit. I am still doing computer vision. I was ready to earn less to do research in a critical field for society, but I abandoned mostly because of this stupid barrier, that said that not only should I be ready to earn less, but also pay a huge rent to people I know to be parasites in order to be allowed to help research. Fuck that.
• heisenbit 9y ago
  There are a lot of faulty, manipulated or statistically underpowered studies out there. Some are doing real damage and the only way to stop it is to look at the details and discredit them. Worse there are people out there who specialize in selective quoting and manipulating our understanding of science. Case in point "The plant paradox" book telling everyone that egg yokes reduce cholesterol and citing a paper which said the exact opposite: https://youtu.be/7NT4q_5dfLs?t=216 https://youtu.be/7NT4q_5dfLs?t=216 People wielding science have a lot of power - without transparency there is no accountability.
• tombert 9y ago
  I definitely have issue with the fact that so many papers are behind Paywalls, and I don't really have a problem with SciHub, since I think research should be open, but don't most of the major professional organizations/communities give you a Spotify-like access to papers? I know my ACM membership, which is ~$200 a year has given me access to a ton of compsci papers. Maybe ACM is the exception on this?
  • philipkglass 9y ago
    Journal access through society membership is like needing a subscription service for every record label. I do a lot of reading about solar power technologies. Relevant articles are published in journals of the IEEE, ACS, IOP, RSC, OSA, APS, AIP... and a bunch of non-society journals too.
• gobengo 9y ago
  Journals and publishers should start focusing on creating value out of their community: the authors and readers they've attracted. http://hypothes.is/ http://hypothes.is/ is a nonprofit that makes annotation tech that some are using to publish peer-reviews, not just the article. I think that's pretty cool. Give the content away for free (you have to/should), but focus on having the best community around it.
• philjohn 9y ago
  They get the content for free, they get the editing for free, now that they are digital rather than print, distribution costs almost nothing ... and then they sell back the research to the institutions who created it in the first place. They're a parasite, and have been for years. The other awful part is their "bundling" - only want access to journals X, Y and Z? Tough. You have to buy them in a package that includes bottom of the barrel journals A-W as well, for a huge fee.
  • Fomite 9y ago
    Two thoughts: - Most of the journals I publish in do a considerable amount of layout, and I find this to be a significant value in reading papers. - At least one of the academic societies I'm in is essentially financially dependent on the income they make from allowing $Publisher to publish their society journal. My corner of science would be considerably worse off if that was dropped.
    • philjohn 9y ago
      They are certainly valid points, and the second one especially so, but the current situation can't go on.
• putano 9y ago
  you have failed big time. I am your biggest enemy of the padt. I am going to hunt you down, and you are going to suffer.... useless piece of shit The past always comes back when you least expect it...
• deleted 9y ago
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• fgjjgutjvnu 9y ago
  The comparison to the music industry omits that other than music, science tends to be funded by governments.
• dannypgh 9y ago
  In my opinion, at the root of a lot of these problems is the fact that copyright has moved from being something designed to have a very limited duration and then expire, to something that lasts far more than a lifetime. If copyright still expired in 14 or 28 years, we'd have a rich public domain from which to draw from. Think about all of the "fan fiction" that could be commercialized, or the textbooks which could be freely modified and redistributed by students and the academic community. Because the public domain has been cheated out of such wealth (in no small part due to lobbying by Disney and other IP-based corporations) it really doesn't surprise me that piracy is so popular.
  • Noos 9y ago
    What wealth? We already have plenty of public domain works, and they get bundled 50 to 100 movies in a set for ten dollars. We already have plenty of things you can make fan fiction of an monetize, but very little public domain stuff gets that. There was a spate of this in comics, with people attempting to do that with The Shadow or Green Hornet, or other lapsed properties. What people really want to do is make money by piggybacking off established brands that spend a lot of money to remain relevant. They don't want public domain in general, they want disney to be stripped of copyright protections so they can milk them dry through parasitical works. But they don't get that once that happens, the works because worthless precisely because no one is willing to spend more than the bare minimum on something they can't protect. It just winds up on youtube for free; who cares about spending money restoring or advertising for it?
    • deleted 9y ago
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    • dannypgh 9y ago
      You're telling me star wars would have never been made if Lucas only had 28 years of exclusive rights to the franchise? Please. Here's some public domain characters that have ended up in works that have given a lot of people entertainment: Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Dolittle... that Mickey Mouse and C3PO haven't joined this list is only because of relatively recent extension of copyright terms, which have amounted to a transfer of wealth towards those who didn't need more of it to be artistically creative...
• yk 9y ago
  > After all, the pirates have long since been chased out of the music business (Gapper, 2017). Did somebody tell the pirates?
  • infogulch 9y ago
    That quote is plain wrong. The pirates weren't chased out of the music business. While they have declined, they still exist (like you said). Why have they declined? Because free was out-competed by paid options. Spotify/Netflix/iTunes etc is a better experience than free, where the value of the experience is greater to the user than its cost. If publishers want to come out of this alive, they have to start providing more value than some dude running a server out of their basement could.
• dougmccune 9y ago
  The topic of academic journals comes up repeatedly on HN (which is great) and is inevitably filled with an echo chamber of people saying that publishers add zero value, produce a literally worthless product, and they should all be put out of business. I’ve grown tired of the hyperbole, but sometimes (like now) I try to add a bit of perspective from within the industry. FWIW I serve on the board of SAGE, which is an independent but relatively large academic publisher. Publishing articles has real costs. This is not about hosting PDFs, it’s about everything that goes into editorial curation, managing peer review, marketing a journal to build a brand, copy editing/formatting, and then yes, finally at the end of the day hosting a PDF. Those tasks do indeed have costs. They range from anywhere from something on the order of $500 - $5,000 per published article. Nobody is publishing at scale for cheaper than that. The argument that it should only cost something like $30 to publish an article is a complete fantasy. So if you want to argue about the value add and that all publishers do is sit around collecting rent for doing nothing, you have to check your hyperbole and come to the debate with reasoned arguments about the realistic costs of performing the very real tasks that are performed. There has never been a better time to try to be an academic publisher for cheaper than the incumbents. The tech infrastructure is there, clearly the PR and anti-publisher sentiment is on your side. So why aren’t there millions of publishers springing up to publish articles for $30 a pop (or even better - free!)? It’s because it’s not possible to do the job that’s required for free or for that low a price. But there are literally no technical barriers to someone trying. Come up with a complete alternative to the journal system for publishing research, or figure out how to magically do it for free. There’s nothing technical in your way, but there are still major hurdles. You’ll find that doing the job a publisher does in fact involve work. You can deride that work all you want, but you cannot deny that publisher do indeed spend the money to do that work. So if you think that work is truly worthless you should launch a competitor that doesn’t do any work at all. But the biggest barrier to radical changes in business model is all cultural. Academics are slow to change, and you cannot underestimate the importance of reputation. So any competing product has to address the cultural role that journals play (working as proxy for quality measurement and assessing academic job applicants). So yes, you can put PDFs online for basically free. That’s not the job of journals. To replace journals you have to solve the content curation and bestowing of prestige issues in some other way. There are loads of people trying (or startups that have died trying), and so far nothing has done much to dislodge the journal (and particularly Impact Factor) as the sole arbiter of academic quality. It’s a heroic task to try to tackle, because largely I think the world would be a better place if there was some real disruption in how academics judge other academics. Now onto Gold OA. From my perspective Gold OA, which means the author funds the publication of the article, typically through baking it into the research funding grant, is making HUGE progress. Gold OA publishing is one of the fastest growing segments (both by revenue and number of articles published) for all major publishers — at least in STM fields. In fields where there isn’t readily accessible grant money (the humanities and social sciences) there isn’t nearly as much progress on Gold OA (and the path forward isn’t clear either). But Gold OA is so mainstream now that I can imagine it gobbling up the entirety of STM publishing in 10-20 years (god I hope before that, but this industry moves slow). I’m happy to talk more about academic publishing from the counter perspective to most people here, although a lot of these discussions can be more productive outside of the HN forum. Feel free to email me (details in profile).
• Chiba-City 9y ago
  Getting any technical books even for money before Borders and now Amazon arrived was almost impossible. I used to go to DC's Library of Congress to get papers on garbage collection. Publishers freaked out over Xerox machines during the 80's. Financial windfall incentives were never good reasons to study or design. Broke lesser universities mostly funnel noise into our pools of research. Silly entertainment fictions and games are more valuable in dollars. Information asymmetries on taxpayer subsidized research was both unjust and leveraged for cascading abuses. Non-monetizable riches are the HIGH CLASS problems our civilization needs. We can solve that "problem" forever.
• swack 9y ago
  Upbump because white male writer said something with no co-POC writer. Mighty proud of ya, so brave.
• KKKKkkkk1 9y ago
  The job of the journals is in providing middle-man services for scientists. Everyone loves to hate middle men, but sometimes you can't do without them. The best way to trade equities is on a stock exchange. Similarly, the best way to prove that you're a scientist of the caliber that publishes in Nature or Science is to publish in Nature or Science.
  • lou1306 9y ago
    The people who accept/reject your paper are mostly volunteers [1], so that service alone doesn't justify the prices. And if you take a look around this thread, the other services really aren't that much better. [1] https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/75147/do-peer-reviewers-receive-any-salary/75163#75163 https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/75147/do-peer-r...
    • KKKKkkkk1 9y ago
      The people who sell or buy my shares of stock don't work for the stock exchange either. That's what makes the exchange a middle man.
• red_admiral 9y ago
  In cryptography, we've had eprint.iacr.org for a while now and if you want your paper to get noticed, an eprint version will do more for you than a talk at a second-tier conference. Even at first-tier conferences like Crypto, people will sometimes have "eprint 20xx/yyy" on their last slide to encourage people to go and read the paper. Peer review still has direct value, and peer reviewed publications on your CV have indirect value so the IACR conferences (and possibly Springer/LNCS) aren't going away any time soon. But everyone I know of in the field looks on eprint first when they actually want to read papers.
• beisner 9y ago
  I am very much in favor of open access, but there is one service that these publishers could definitely provide that would definitely be a value-add: replication. I can imagine a prestigious journal or publisher using the money they've collected to sponsor studies that replicate results. I need to think more on how this model could work such that piracy doesn't circumvent it, but I think there is definitely a need for more replication studies and prestigious publishers have an incentive to ensure that their studies are replicable.
  • yyyyip 9y ago
    You are hopelessly naive if you think for profit publishers would ever do that.
    • beisner 9y ago
      It's not necessarily a concept relegated to the publishers. Just a potential revenue model for replication.
  • Vinnl 9y ago
    > prestigious publishers have an incentive to ensure that their studies are replicable If only. Prestige (or at least, a high Impact Factor) correlates somewhat with more retractions. Which is relatively straightforward to explain: "prestigious" is where people go with novel, exciting results that have a higher chance to be cited more often, but those are exactly the type of results that have more chance of being inaccurate, exaggerated, and just prone to regression to the mean.
• modeless 9y ago
  It's simple. Stop selling journals and host conferences instead. People are still willing to pay for conferences even if the papers are published open access. The gatekeeping role played by journals can be replaced by conferences.
• allenz 9y ago
  Title, together with the domain, is very misleading. The impression is that Wiley is admitting defeat against open access. Instead, the author (not affiliated with Wiley) regrets that piracy is winning over open access.
• Froyoh 9y ago
  Cody Doctorow's Information Doesn't Want to Be Free is a good read about this. https://archive.org/details/InformationDoesntWantToBeFree https://archive.org/details/InformationDoesntWantToBeFree
• eecc 9y ago
  Love how these parasites appropriate words like "fairness" and define the scope of all possible ethical options within the bounds of whatever business model is profitable for them... ... bah
• dragonwriter 9y ago
  The article and it's original title are about black open access (piracy) winning over green (author-distributed in parallel to journal publication) and gold (journals being paid, per article, to directly provide open access) open access models, not about open access winning over non-open access. Taking “black” out of the title radically changes the meaning.
• fsloth 9y ago
  Did anyone actually read to the end before unloading the acerbic comments? This article is obviously targeted to the people involved in publishing who care only about the profit model part and not of the science part. I presume that's why it reads like a first year essay in some economic degree. As an occasional consumer of research papers I see nothing wrong of the conclusion in the end: "I suggest that we might be encouraged by the airline industry and unbundle the product. This would make all content free to read, answering the plea that the results of publicly funded research be available to the public,"
• Frogolocalypse 9y ago
  I'm not sure many people who have commented on this article actually read the entire thing through. I think it was a very insightful article on the vertically integrated business of scientific study that was the issue, and the suggestions as they relate to the airline industry as something that I hadn't seen spelled out in such a detailed manner before.
• Vinnl 9y ago
  The title here and many comments are based on a misunderstanding: the article is not about _open access_ beating closed access, the article is about _piracy_ beating proper open access. The question is: we've spent so many years trying to make sure published research free to access, trying different models [1] to make it happen, with only very limited success. How come Sci-Hub is taking off so well, and what can we do to free articles from paywalls legally? [1] https://medium.com/flockademic/how-open-can-open-access-be-cf6662565ecd https://medium.com/flockademic/how-open-can-open-access-be-c...
• fnj 9y ago
  > We've failed: open access is winning and we must change our approach "What do you mean, "we", white man?"
• 2439u23uro 9y ago
  It's rather ridiculous to call people who use sci-hub pirates as the entire purpose of sci-hub is to make paper that should be publicly available for free exactly that. How hypocritical that many studies are funded by tax-payers, yet people need to pay arbitrary fees to access these papers. If anything sci-hub might lead to enhanced quality of papers, unlike the misguided conclusions of the author of this paper.
• msh317 9y ago
  Open Access will always win, the question is how to take content to the next level. For example providing free open access to content is the product Google, Yahoo, FaceBook offer. The real question is how to take content, music, novels, academic papers, etc. into the value chain. Artists will always produce inspiring things, they get paid however only when that inspiration creates value, so the question is how to measure that value and return to the creator of value. This seems simple enough – measure, gather, settle, return. For example, our system of transportation paid for by the community of interest – yet it returns value in the form of supporting a supply chain. Indirect, but successful.
• HaoZeke 9y ago
  Does this really matter to people trying to publish and get recognition? I know for a fact that professors, like any author are touched when people discuss their work. I've never heard of anyone first asking where they got the article from or if they paid for it.. Research is hard enough without worrying about the bean counters.
• posterboy 9y ago
  While the analogy to musical recording publishers does not fully compare to the scientific publishing in question here, I'd like to point out the similarity to start-up funding, venture capitalism et al: It's quite funny how some will argue against music lables on a site like this. At least the vetting and fostering part should apply to scientific publishing, too.