29 ms·

I still don't see why all the scientific paper publishing stuff is allowed to work in the way that it does. I mean, don't a large % of the people doing that res

by stryk 9y ago

I still don't see why all the scientific paper publishing stuff is allowed to work in the way that it does. I mean, don't a large % of the people doing that research use funding from government grants? If public money was used to produce the research, then the public should have free and available access to it -- we already paid for it.

jacquesm 9y ago
Ostensibly you are not paying Elsevier to access the research, you are paying them because they obtained the right to copy the paper. That's the loophole that many of the writers use to publish pre-prints from their own homepages. That did not stop the publishers from suing them: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/elsevier-versus-open-access http://www.wired.co.uk/article/elsevier-versus-open-access
- sapper123 9y ago
  Is the right to copy the paper an agreement between universities and the publisher? If so, can't the universities just give a middle finger to the publisher, cancel those rights and allow the research to be publicized for free, in the interest of furthering research, or is money that they get from the publisher that significant?
  - marvy 9y ago
    I'm not an expert in this area, but I'm pretty sure they get no money at all from the publishers. Other way around in fact: their libraries spend large fraction of budget subscribing to the journals.
    - black_puppydog 9y ago
      Plus a one-time fee for every paper they publish. Whith the option to pay more and make it open access. And then the library of the same university will still pay to access this article.
  - Vinnl 9y ago
    No, it's an agreement between researchers and the publishers, and the researchers feel dependent on the publisher for their careers (publishing in "high impact" journals is good for it), so they often blindly accept whichever terms the publisher shoves down their throats. And no, no real money from the publisher is involved.
kilotaras 9y ago
Public need doesn't always align with individuals incentives. Public wants new high-quality, available knowledge. Individual researcher are incentivized to publish often and in high impact journals. This in turn leads to both lower quality research (see replication crisis) and preservation of status quo in publishing.
Vinnl 9y ago
It's not so much allowed to as well as that it's hard to change (although there's a lot of attempts to). A long-read on how it got this way at [1], and a shorter summary of why it won't change at [2] (which I wrote). [1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b... [2] https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarly-publishing-eef794937c9c https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarl...

by stryk 9y ago

jacquesm 9y ago

Ostensibly you are not paying Elsevier to access the research, you are paying them because they obtained the right to copy the paper. That's the loophole that many of the writers use to publish pre-prints from their own homepages. That did not stop the publishers from suing them: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/elsevier-versus-open-access http://www.wired.co.uk/article/elsevier-versus-open-access

sapper123 9y ago
Is the right to copy the paper an agreement between universities and the publisher? If so, can't the universities just give a middle finger to the publisher, cancel those rights and allow the research to be publicized for free, in the interest of furthering research, or is money that they get from the publisher that significant?
- marvy 9y ago
  I'm not an expert in this area, but I'm pretty sure they get no money at all from the publishers. Other way around in fact: their libraries spend large fraction of budget subscribing to the journals.
  - black_puppydog 9y ago
    Plus a one-time fee for every paper they publish. Whith the option to pay more and make it open access. And then the library of the same university will still pay to access this article.
- Vinnl 9y ago
  No, it's an agreement between researchers and the publishers, and the researchers feel dependent on the publisher for their careers (publishing in "high impact" journals is good for it), so they often blindly accept whichever terms the publisher shoves down their throats. And no, no real money from the publisher is involved.

kilotaras 9y ago

Public need doesn't always align with individuals incentives. Public wants new high-quality, available knowledge. Individual researcher are incentivized to publish often and in high impact journals. This in turn leads to both lower quality research (see replication crisis) and preservation of status quo in publishing.

Vinnl 9y ago

It's not so much allowed to as well as that it's hard to change (although there's a lot of attempts to). A long-read on how it got this way at [1], and a shorter summary of why it won't change at [2] (which I wrote). [1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b... [2] https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarly-publishing-eef794937c9c https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarl...