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French Universities Cancel Subscriptions to Springer Journals
- gmueckl 9y agoMeanwhile, German universities are teaming up for joint negotiations with journal publishers. Their first target is Elsevier. My university came close to losing access to Elsevier journals as a part of this move.
- egourlao 9y agoThat's also what the French are doing ; first paragraph of the article: > [...] an impasse in fee negotiations between [Springer Journals] and Couperin.org, a national consortium representing more than 250 academic institutions in France.
- tutanchamun 9y agoThey should go even further and unite between nations. If most of the universities of europe would negotiate as a consortium they would have even more power. Of course I would prefers solutions which get rid of elsevier, springer etc...
- mgr86 9y agoI work at a small non-profit anthropological database. Our primary target is academia. We can only employ a small team of developers (2) and 12-13 total staff. About a decade ago Germany negotiated with us our only perpetual access license for all of their universities. Consortia memberships in the US and Canada are not uncommon either. However, Germany possess our only perpetual license. A lot of us desire open access, however, we are not sure how we would fund ourselves. Our subscription rates are generally very low. Especially compared to these large journals.
- icebraining 9y agoCould you get a grant or two?
- mgr86 9y ago>Could you get a grant or two? -- Re:open-access? Perhaps. I should note that this area is not my expertise. However, what to do when the grant runs out? Even so most of our revenue comes from the subscription. A grant may pay for hosting, but what about the time of the developers. Or those working on the publication side. We are already on a near skeleton crew. Especially compared to what we had here in the 1940-80s.
- icebraining 9y agoHowever, what to do when the grant runs out? Well, you get another. Lots of non-profits run only on grants. Have you thought about applying for EU grants? Open Access is one of the goals on Horizon 2020, the €80B EU program[1], but even after that there's no shortage of EU cash being dumped on anything even barely related to "innovation". [1] https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/sites/horizon2020/files/FactSheet_Open_Access.pdf https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/sites/horizon202...
- lolc 9y agoGood thing when rent-seekers are countered. It doesn't happen enough.
- cornholio 9y agoIn related news, the academic publishing problem is still unsolved. There is no standard model to fund the resource intensive process of peer review in the open access journals and their role as a gatekeeper for scientific relevance, advancement and funding.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- chrisseaton 9y agoThe solution is technically easy - reciprocal peer review so you pay other people to review your papers by agreeing to review others’ papers, and then publishing on arXiv. Computer science basically does this but replaces arXiv with an industry body the ACM. I don’t see why it needs to be any more complex than that.
- prepend 9y agoThis is hard for new authors as you don’t know if the reviewer is competent. So new authors would have to pay. So a problem.
- chrisseaton 9y agoI don’t literally mean you do n reviews to get your review - I mean members of the community generally spend some time reviewing. If you're new you will get some of your papers reviewed before you start to contribute back but it’s not a problem. It’s how it works now in CS.
- amelius 9y agoCan't we have a system where a paper is not necessarily reviewed at first, but as time goes by, more and more reviewers endorse the paper?
- chrisseaton 9y agoThe review process gives authors feedback which they use to improve their paper before it's published, and authors usually appreciate that. It's also a chance to stop major errors being published, and again authors usually appreciate things like that being caught before the paper becomes public.
- fermigier 9y agoBest move would be to institutionally forbid, or disincentive somehow, publication in non open access journals.
- ekianjo 9y agoshould be easy to do for publicly funded research.
- dethos 9y agoAgree, if funded with public money, the outcomes (papers, ...) should be open and freely available to everyone.
- ljegou 9y agoIt's coming : https://www.openaire.eu/france-final-text-of-the-law-for-oa-has-been-adopted https://www.openaire.eu/france-final-text-of-the-law-for-oa-...
- WhompingWindows 9y agoLook at the UK's regulations. If UK govt money goes into a research project, it must be open access. They are, to my knowledge, the only country which uses this policy.
- toufka 9y agoThat is actually true in the US as well with NIH funded research [1] (the majority of biomedical research). HOWEVER, the research need only be opened after a time-embargo (generally a year). Additionally larger universities like the University of California system also 'require' open access publication [2] - however waivers to that requirement are often sought and easily granted. In both cases, the policies (NIH in 2009, UC system in 2013) were shots across the bows of the large publishers, and permit a gradual easing of the culture without just blowing it up. So long as the eventual goal of all open-access is met in a relatively timely fashion, I think the strategy of slowly cinching down the rule is a reasonable compromise. [1] https://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm https://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm [2] https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/open-access-policy/index.html https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/open-access-policy/in...
- haZard_OS 9y agoMy hope is that the ethos of FAIR* data sharing principles spreads and researchers finally replace the current commercial aspect of publications with an endowment funded system. * https://www.monash.edu/ands/working-with-data/fairdata https://www.monash.edu/ands/working-with-data/fairdata
- pedrocr 9y ago>replace the current commercial aspect of publications with an endowment funded system The research itself is funded by the tax payer. The peer review is funded by the tax payer. What endowment funding is needed to replace whatever Springer is actually providing? This whole mess is solvable with a single law. Just have the EU or the US legislate that any tax payer funded research (including research with external grants but done by researchers in public universities) needs to be available free of charge for download to any citizen. The whole "sector" would unravel pretty quickly after that as it should. Charging the tax payer, through huge contracts like this one being renegotiated in France, huge sums for access to the very research the tax payer has already paid for to be done in the first place is a complete travesty.
- cnees 9y agoI’ve been reading these comments because I’m always seeking ideas for how to distribute peer review and provide signals about paper quality. How could we leverage the Internet and a large group of authors and papers to show readers which papers thrown online are of citable quality? Surely there’s something we can do beyond counting page views.
- achileas 9y agoThe system as it is requires experts to review - peer review isn't "let any random person review" so I'm not sure leveraging the Internet in the traditional sense is the way to go. There are scientist social networks, but they don't have a lot of traction, and there's something to be said for the refereed process that exists. Both knowledge extraction and signaling paper quality are fascinating, hard problems in modern science. I wish I had answers beyond criticism of the current system, but it might be a problem for people far smarter than I.
- cnees 9y agoSupposing one of the scientist social networks implemented the refereed peer review process for some or all papers they host, funding it with ad revenue, APCs, and/or freemium instead of charging universities and readers, what more could they do to improve the system? Better post-publication review/redaction/amnendment for work we don’t realize is wrong until much later? A rating system?
- berryg 9y agoI have not given this much thought or did any research. It is just an idea that popped into my head reading this thread. Why not just replicate the open source software model? Author opens a git repository on a github like repository. Reviewer can comment on the content repository. Article versions are stored and changes are stored for future reference. Even research data can be stored in same repository. Reviewers can build up a reputation by reviewing articles. Articles can even be forked or referenced. Articles with the most references and reviewed by reviewers with a good reputation can thus rise to the "top". Technically everything is in place. Or I am too much of a technical optimist?
- notyourday 9y agoScience: journals are too expensive! they should be cheaper! HN: Just do it yourself! It is easy! You already do the hard part! Yay! -- -- -*- At the same time. Poster: this is how you run your small db HN: Oursource your databases! Outsource your apps! Oursource your auth! Outsource your mail! It is difficult!
- erikpukinskis 9y agoI don’t see the paradox?
- notyourday 9y agoPeople who say outsource everything to techies are the people who tell scientists to insource their journals.
- erikpukinskis 9y agoAren’t they saying scientists can now insource their journals because everything but the labor they are already doing has been outsourced to software?
- aj7 9y agoWhat has always underpinned this flawed and collapsing business is that successfully published works in “prestigious journals” are a form of private property to the authors. A series of such publications can result in tenure or lifetime job security and prestige for the author. The PRESENT VALUE of cash flows associated with such publications is a number of million dollars in advanced societies, and no cash investment was required on the part of the beneficiary. And the publishing fees are paid by someone else. So the researchers went along with the system which only began to crack due to two factors: (1) Developing economies needed the information but couldn’t afford it at absurd prices (2) Commercial application began to eclipse government and defense as a research driver.
- WhompingWindows 9y agoYour post lacks crucial detail. I worked in a scientific journal and am familiar with the pipeline of article creation. Can you elaborate on who "someone else" is that is paying the publishing fees? These are often derived from grants authors have received. Furthermore, where is your evidence that commercial applications have eclipsed government/defense as research drivers? The vast majority of the studies I reviewed in the scientific journal were not directly related to commercial applications, but were most often funded by government organizations of one kind or another (CDC, NIH, defense, tech innovation funds, etc. from various countries). Your comment just doesn't square with my experience in the industry.
- killjoywashere 9y agoAs a government/defense researcher, there is definitely more money available from industry sponsors. When I go to internal conferences with my bretheren, their salary is paid for, they have interesting problems, and no money or political will to organize basic processes, like a common infrastructure. Meanwhile, my project, a collaboration with industry, has literally anything we need and more.
- agjacobson 9y ago(1) Someone else in this context refers to anyone other than the author-researcher. The point I am attempting to make is that researchers, as long as they are on an academic grant and salary, and with the prospects of generating millions of dollars of private property, have no incentive to change the system. (2) It is clear that in electronics, biochemistry, and even in my little field, laser physics, the commercial applications overwhelm traditional pure research in degree of economic input, persons employed, turnover, etc. This is true in all hard sciences and life sciences. If it is not true in other fields, do they outweigh the scientific engineering fields? I think not.
- fnordsensei 9y agoThe alternative business model that the world is moving to is Open Access. The difference being that instead of paying to access the journal or paper, the researcher or institution that wishes to publish pays up front to have the paper published. Open Access has its own problems, such as predatory journals, where researchers who don't know better or who are desperate to publish are more or less lied to as to the reach and validity of a journal. It has become an area ripe for a new kind of scammers. This has prompted efforts such as Think, Check, Submit[1]. There's also the problem with raising the funds to publish something as Open Access. It's not always the case that the researcher actually has the means to pay for Open Access. Nevertheless, Open Access is clearly the way where the research community is headed, and we're going to see a steady growth in percentage of research published as such over the next decade or so. But it does come with its own set of problems to solve. 1: https://thinkchecksubmit.org/ https://thinkchecksubmit.org/
- dramaking 9y agoYup. PLOS was founded partially to do just that - prove that Open Access can work as a business model.
- denzil_correa 9y ago> The alternative business model that the world is moving to is Open Access. That's one of the possible alternative, not the only alternative. Another alternative would be to have peer review as done today where authors pay for PDF hosting, server maintenance costs etc. and not the cost of "publishing" as in the traditional sense.
- fnordsensei 9y agoAgreed, clearly not the only model. But it's the one that seems to be gathering the most momentum at the moment.
- jfaucett 9y agoI'm going to be honest. IMHO publishing a paper should be like doing a PR on github and there is no reason it shouldn't be. You do your research, read the "PR" i.e. submission guidelines and submit it, - sure let the committer and reviewers be anonymized until the PR has been accepted - then just pull it into a "Repo" aka journal and be done. How can this process cost tons of money?
- ddavis 9y agoInteresting that the publishers are still allowing the universities access (at least for now) while the universities refuse the publisher's wishes.
- sitkack 9y agoBecause if the Universities truly leave, the publishers are screwed. This is cycle of feudalisation or corporatization, unchecked power created an imbalance, but that imbalance threatens the power holder because their power is only symbiotic, not absolute. Publishers need Universities to both consume the product and create the product. If they cut them off, it will only force the inevitable.
- jzl 9y agoNo one has mentioned the heroic work of Sci-Hub yet, so here's an obligatory link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16332139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16332139
- ginko 9y agoElsevier and Springer are European companies. I wonder if the EU countries could just nationalize them.
- harunurhan 9y agoHere's an interesting and relevant project, scoap3. It tries to convert high quality journals to open access with an interesting model. [1] https://scoap3.org/ https://scoap3.org/ Disclosure: I work at the same section as scoap3 team, at CERN.
- dmitriz 9y agoRelated discussion on the Publishing Reform Forum: https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/38 https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/38 Please help us by expressing your opinion and public support on the forum. There is still a lot of work needed to convince the journals' editors.