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> I am of the opinion knowledge should be free and easily accessible. I understand hatred for academic publishers, however this argument makes no sense. It ta

> I am of the opinion knowledge should be free and easily accessible. I understand hatred for academic publishers, however this argument makes no sense. It takes work to produce human knowledge. Writing a book, creating educational materials, and writing research all takes time, just like it takes time to build a house.

dagenix 7y ago
> It takes work to produce human knowledge. Writing a book, creating educational materials, and writing research all takes time, just like it takes time to build a house. My understanding is that most / all articles in academic journals are written by researchers who are not paid by the journal. Then, the articles are peer reviewed by another set of researchers - who are also not paid by the journal. Then, those same researchers are charged by the journal if they want to have access to the article. It's very unclear what value the journal actually brings - outside of slapping a particular well known name on the publication they don't do much. All of the people that actually do the hard work receive no direct compensation.
- unityByFreedom 7y ago
  All knowledge should not be free. The comment above mine wrote knowledge should be free and easily accessible. They are talking about all knowledge, not just academic journals, and that makes no sense.
  - MacsHeadroom 7y ago
    It does make sense. You're just misreading what they said. They did not say information should be unfunded or creators demonitized. They said information should be "free" as in liberated, as in freedom. Valuable information is virtually costless to copy and yet you can be locked away in a cage by men with guns for accessing it. It's not far off from how North Korea handles people found with Western media. That's what the commenter above is advocating against. Have some perspective.
    - unityByFreedom 7y ago
      Please don't reply to every one of my comments with the same points, you are spamming.
      - MacsHeadroom 7y ago
        I'm simply countering disinformation spam with correct information. Have a moment of self awareness for one second and consider this: if I had to make the same rebuttal multiple times to counter act the same argument then who is the spammer and who is just setting the record straight? Hmmmm
      - r-w 7y ago
        This is the equivalent of “If you want this conversation to end, why don’t YOU stop talking?” You already know the solution to the problem you’re having, which is to either make better points or stop inviting more replies.
- eyegor 7y ago
  Your basic assessment is correct, however, you're forgetting a key detail. Every journal I know of also charges the author a fee to submit papers. So the author pays to submit their work, volunteers review it, the author does corrections, and then it might get published behind a pay wall. For any university research, the work itself is paid for mostly via government and private company grants.
  - Blaisorblade0 7y ago
    That sounds weird; all journals I know are paid either by readers or by the submitter (the latter is called gold open access).
    - ajford 7y ago
      The journals I'm familiar with require both. The reader pays for access (or more commonly their university/research org/public library/employer pays for it), and often is only available in bundles, such as multiple unrelated journals or forcing a library to maintain print and digital access even if they only want digital access. The submitter is usually required to pay a submission fee to cover/subsidize the cost of review. Some do allow you to pay a surcharge for open access, and in many cases (at least the grants I was working on) grants and funding cannot be used for these costs. I am overjoyed to see that it's becoming more common to have fully open access journals, or that the open access fee is reduced. And the endorsement of more open access journals for fields that have historically had a dominant closed access journal (such as the American Astronomical Society and it's introduction of new journals like the Planetary Science Journal).
- refurb 7y ago
  Look up Chesterson’s Fence. It’s always a good idea to figure out why the fence exists before tearing it down. Researchers who publish in these journals can publish anywhere, but they choose to publish in these for-profit journals. Do you know why?
  - ajford 7y ago
    A massive majority of the time it's because the name once held meaning and had a strong reputation. In plenty of cases this still holds, even if the pricing model has turned predatory. Plenty of people review for an article due to the prestige, and a journal can become well known for having quality reviewers. When I was in Radio Astronomy, publishing in APJ meant something, but when someone would publish an article pertaining to Radio Astro in Nature or some other publication, it was often looked down on as having less merit since it wasn't in APJ. Personally, I know of a lecturer in my undergrad university who published in a more well known journal because when they suggested publishing in a less well known journal that was more niche and in-line with the field of their research, the chair of the department leaned on them and "strongly advised" that publishing lesser journal could lead to loss of funding for their research group.
  - dagenix 7y ago
    I'm a big fan of the Chesterson's Fence idea - maybe not applied slavishly, but as a general principle. And I have no idea where the journals came from. Nor do I have a suggestion for what to do about them. What I would be interested in reading about is any type of value that they bring to the process other than a name that was established long ago. I have yet to find much in the way that explains their current value for advancing academic knowledge.
    - refurb 7y ago
      Their value is very similar to that offered by Ivy League schools - prestige. The journals have the reputation for only publishing the highest quality, high impact papers. They act a filter. Getting a paper in Nature will help you get tenure or win you that grant you need. Publishing in a no name journal is barely better than not publishing at all. Because these journals are so prestigious, they can charge a lot for access. Every top school will buy access because it would be embarrassing if they didn't. There is nothing stopping researchers from publishing in their favorite open access journal. In fact, they'd probably have a better chance of getting it published. However, they don't want to - those journals aren't prestigious enough. And without enough prestigious papers, they'll never make tenure.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
quadrangle 7y ago
Of course there's development costs to publications. It doesn't follow that we thus must lock publications behind paywalls or clutter them with ads. It's perfectly consistent to both want the work funded and want it free and easily accessible. When someone says knowledge should be free, it's unreasonable and illogical to assume they are saying that knowledge work shouldn't be funded. The discussion of how to fund work without paywalls or ads is worth having. The straw-man argument about whether we should fund work is not.
- unityByFreedom 7y ago
  > It's perfectly consistent to both want the work funded and want it free No, it really isn't. It sounds like you're saying you want someone else to pay for it. That's not free. > When someone says knowledge should be free, it's unreasonable and illogical to assume they are saying that knowledge work shouldn't be funded. Funded work is not free.
  - MacsHeadroom 7y ago
    You're conflating free as in beer with free as in liberty. "Information should be free" means that it shouldn't be caged away- it means free as in liberty. Funded information can be liberated. Shareware is free. Donationware is free. Crowdfunded creative works are often free. Creation of valuable information is effectively infinitely more expensive than copying valuable information. It's not unreasonable to consider that this distinction alone may be enough to consider restrictions on copying abhorrently immoral.
    - unityByFreedom 7y ago
      > You're conflating free as in beer with free as in liberty. "Information should be free" means that it shouldn't be caged away- it means free as in liberty. Sorry, no. What you're describing is "easily accessible". The comment above wrote "knowledge should be free and easily accessible". > Creation of valuable information is effectively infinitely more expensive than copying valuable information. It's not unreasonable to consider that this distinction alone may be enough to consider restrictions on copying abhorrently immoral. That is an entirely unreasonable and absurd conclusion. Of course it takes more effort to produce valuable information than to copy it. That is the whole point of copyright; it protects creators and encourages people to create their own works. In doing so, creators contribute to higher quality of life for everyone by earning an income in exchange for putting the fruits of their labor down on paper.
MacsHeadroom 7y ago
Information freedom radicalism is not in any way mutually exclusive with compensating creators. Grants, shareware, donationware, donation subscriptions (like patreon), crowdfunding, and the list goes on and on- of all the ways information creation is compensated prior to the information being given away for free. Copying information takes virtually no work. It's not unreasonable to hold that the concept of "intillectual property" is morally bankrupt. Nobody here suggested creators shouldn't be compensated.
- unityByFreedom 7y ago
  > Nobody here suggested creators shouldn't be compensated. Sure they did, they said knowledge should be free. If it is funded, someone's got to pay for it, and that is by definition not free. If it is the government who funds it, you're paying for it through tax dollars. And, you're not paying a competitive rate, which means low quality information is coming out. edit: I'm done with this comment chain of people claiming free doesn't mean $0. It clearly did in the original comment to which I replied, where they said "I am of the opinion knowledge should be free and easily accessible."
  - MacsHeadroom 7y ago
    You're mixing up free of cost with free as in liberty. Information freedom is about liberating access to information not demonitizing creators. In the context of freedom of information the opposite of free information is not funded information- it's censored, withheld, horded, etc.
    - unityByFreedom 7y ago
      The market withholds food when they tell you to pay first before taking it home. The same is fair for an author. You don't need to fear paywalls. You're capable of learning and creating the same knowledge as any other person.
      - MacsHeadroom 7y ago
jsilence 7y ago
Usually the work of the creators has already been paid for by public finding. Research grants etc..
dionyziz 7y ago
I'm a researcher. I write the articles in their books. They don't pay me for that. All of the articles are written by people like me. All of the articles are reviewed and edited by people like me. I even do the typesetting. I get paid by a tax-funded university. Publishers (such as Springer) use their money not to produce knowledge, but to sue people, market their conferences and journals, and pay their administrators and shareholders.
- czzr 7y ago
  Hmm... so you get nothing for it, you do all the work and yet you continue to do it? I presume you must be getting something out of the arrangement, else why on earth do you continue?
  - cyphar 7y ago
    Having papers published in journals (especially prestigious ones like Nature) is how you attain status in the research community. Also most research institutions have some expectation that you will publish N papers a year on average (because it also enhances their status).
  - ggrrhh_ta 7y ago
    As many of us doing research, writing, reviewing, typesetting, checking proofs, organizing their dissemination conferences, administrative tasks, filling up IP forms, returning them, getting them checked by attorneys paid on our side, etc., etc., etc., do not get absolutely anything remotely in value to the price it costs to our institutions or peers to access our work. We force ourselves though to do something so illogical and nonsensical because we are evaluated according to inefficient and silly performance bars that emerge from a herd of seemingly intelligent people each acting in their best interest (both those that seek showing their merit, and those that seek evaluating the merit of others), most of which do not have enough power and/or leadership to be the first ones to disrupt the current status quo. ['Tradegy of the Commons' theme] Of course, I would not suggest any student to try to subvert it, as doing it "heroically" will only constitute an obstacle for themselves without doing anything to convince your rightly-so competitive peers to join your efforts rather than to overtake you. [edited: sentence corrected] However, things are slowly changing, as people & institutions with the right amount of power and leadership are starting to take action.
layoutIfNeeded 7y ago
And how exactly do publishers contribute to said work? Research is done by researchers; papers are written by researchers; and papers are reviewed by other researchers for free...
rndgermandude 7y ago
The research is already funded differently, usually through (public) grants, salaries of the researchers and everybody on their teams (taxes, tuition), or even patent revenues. Nobody makes money off of publications except for the publishers. Some publishers even demand money from the authors for their publishing "services". The publishers themselves add very little value, as e.g. peer reviews are done for "free" (aka on the universities or peer-reviewers dime), or rather for the prestige that comes from being a reviewer. What's more, a lot of the authors of what's published actually want to publish their work for everybody else to see. But they are currently caught between a rock and a hard place: they need the "reputation" that comes from publishing in "prestigious" journals but those journals or rather the parent publishing companies require signing a contract saying that the article may not be published elsewhere, not even on the authors personal website. In short, the actual research work has been paid for already, academics (authors and peer reviewers) are fucked, the public (who often paid for the research already) is fucked, and the publishers are money-printing-machines. You could easily replace the publishers with a few non-profit orgs that are funded by universities for a couple of hundred bucks per university per month, and make all the content available for "free" to everybody on the planet in perpetuity. There are over 25,000 universities worldwide, so if every university paid e.g. 200 bucks a month, it would come out as $5M per month, which is enough to fund the publishing end of every last scientific journal in existence and then some (assuming we keep not paying authors and peer reviewers through such publishing, like it is now) If I was the regulator in charge, the first thing I would do is require all work that is - in part - paid for by public taxpayer funds or public university funds to be published under a free license, since the public already paid for the work. Similar to e.g. works created by US government - and some other governments - is automatically in the public domain already; that's why e.g. all those nice NASA pictures are "freely" available to everybody already, because the US federal tax payers already paid about $35 bucks on average per year to fund ALL of NASA.
- unityByFreedom 7y ago
  > The research is already funded differently Yes, I understand the hatred for academic publishers b/c they don't fund the research. The comment above said 'knowledge should be free' and that is what I was responding to.

dagenix 7y ago

> It takes work to produce human knowledge. Writing a book, creating educational materials, and writing research all takes time, just like it takes time to build a house. My understanding is that most / all articles in academic journals are written by researchers who are not paid by the journal. Then, the articles are peer reviewed by another set of researchers - who are also not paid by the journal. Then, those same researchers are charged by the journal if they want to have access to the article. It's very unclear what value the journal actually brings - outside of slapping a particular well known name on the publication they don't do much. All of the people that actually do the hard work receive no direct compensation.

unityByFreedom 7y ago
All knowledge should not be free. The comment above mine wrote knowledge should be free and easily accessible. They are talking about all knowledge, not just academic journals, and that makes no sense.
- MacsHeadroom 7y ago
  It does make sense. You're just misreading what they said. They did not say information should be unfunded or creators demonitized. They said information should be "free" as in liberated, as in freedom. Valuable information is virtually costless to copy and yet you can be locked away in a cage by men with guns for accessing it. It's not far off from how North Korea handles people found with Western media. That's what the commenter above is advocating against. Have some perspective.
  - unityByFreedom 7y ago
    Please don't reply to every one of my comments with the same points, you are spamming.
    - MacsHeadroom 7y ago
      I'm simply countering disinformation spam with correct information. Have a moment of self awareness for one second and consider this: if I had to make the same rebuttal multiple times to counter act the same argument then who is the spammer and who is just setting the record straight? Hmmmm
    - r-w 7y ago
      This is the equivalent of “If you want this conversation to end, why don’t YOU stop talking?” You already know the solution to the problem you’re having, which is to either make better points or stop inviting more replies.
eyegor 7y ago
Your basic assessment is correct, however, you're forgetting a key detail. Every journal I know of also charges the author a fee to submit papers. So the author pays to submit their work, volunteers review it, the author does corrections, and then it might get published behind a pay wall. For any university research, the work itself is paid for mostly via government and private company grants.
- Blaisorblade0 7y ago
  That sounds weird; all journals I know are paid either by readers or by the submitter (the latter is called gold open access).
  - ajford 7y ago
    The journals I'm familiar with require both. The reader pays for access (or more commonly their university/research org/public library/employer pays for it), and often is only available in bundles, such as multiple unrelated journals or forcing a library to maintain print and digital access even if they only want digital access. The submitter is usually required to pay a submission fee to cover/subsidize the cost of review. Some do allow you to pay a surcharge for open access, and in many cases (at least the grants I was working on) grants and funding cannot be used for these costs. I am overjoyed to see that it's becoming more common to have fully open access journals, or that the open access fee is reduced. And the endorsement of more open access journals for fields that have historically had a dominant closed access journal (such as the American Astronomical Society and it's introduction of new journals like the Planetary Science Journal).
refurb 7y ago
Look up Chesterson’s Fence. It’s always a good idea to figure out why the fence exists before tearing it down. Researchers who publish in these journals can publish anywhere, but they choose to publish in these for-profit journals. Do you know why?
- ajford 7y ago
  A massive majority of the time it's because the name once held meaning and had a strong reputation. In plenty of cases this still holds, even if the pricing model has turned predatory. Plenty of people review for an article due to the prestige, and a journal can become well known for having quality reviewers. When I was in Radio Astronomy, publishing in APJ meant something, but when someone would publish an article pertaining to Radio Astro in Nature or some other publication, it was often looked down on as having less merit since it wasn't in APJ. Personally, I know of a lecturer in my undergrad university who published in a more well known journal because when they suggested publishing in a less well known journal that was more niche and in-line with the field of their research, the chair of the department leaned on them and "strongly advised" that publishing lesser journal could lead to loss of funding for their research group.
- dagenix 7y ago
  I'm a big fan of the Chesterson's Fence idea - maybe not applied slavishly, but as a general principle. And I have no idea where the journals came from. Nor do I have a suggestion for what to do about them. What I would be interested in reading about is any type of value that they bring to the process other than a name that was established long ago. I have yet to find much in the way that explains their current value for advancing academic knowledge.
  - refurb 7y ago
    Their value is very similar to that offered by Ivy League schools - prestige. The journals have the reputation for only publishing the highest quality, high impact papers. They act a filter. Getting a paper in Nature will help you get tenure or win you that grant you need. Publishing in a no name journal is barely better than not publishing at all. Because these journals are so prestigious, they can charge a lot for access. Every top school will buy access because it would be embarrassing if they didn't. There is nothing stopping researchers from publishing in their favorite open access journal. In fact, they'd probably have a better chance of getting it published. However, they don't want to - those journals aren't prestigious enough. And without enough prestigious papers, they'll never make tenure.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

quadrangle 7y ago

Of course there's development costs to publications. It doesn't follow that we thus must lock publications behind paywalls or clutter them with ads. It's perfectly consistent to both want the work funded and want it free and easily accessible. When someone says knowledge should be free, it's unreasonable and illogical to assume they are saying that knowledge work shouldn't be funded. The discussion of how to fund work without paywalls or ads is worth having. The straw-man argument about whether we should fund work is not.

unityByFreedom 7y ago
> It's perfectly consistent to both want the work funded and want it free No, it really isn't. It sounds like you're saying you want someone else to pay for it. That's not free. > When someone says knowledge should be free, it's unreasonable and illogical to assume they are saying that knowledge work shouldn't be funded. Funded work is not free.
- MacsHeadroom 7y ago
  You're conflating free as in beer with free as in liberty. "Information should be free" means that it shouldn't be caged away- it means free as in liberty. Funded information can be liberated. Shareware is free. Donationware is free. Crowdfunded creative works are often free. Creation of valuable information is effectively infinitely more expensive than copying valuable information. It's not unreasonable to consider that this distinction alone may be enough to consider restrictions on copying abhorrently immoral.
  - unityByFreedom 7y ago
    > You're conflating free as in beer with free as in liberty. "Information should be free" means that it shouldn't be caged away- it means free as in liberty. Sorry, no. What you're describing is "easily accessible". The comment above wrote "knowledge should be free and easily accessible". > Creation of valuable information is effectively infinitely more expensive than copying valuable information. It's not unreasonable to consider that this distinction alone may be enough to consider restrictions on copying abhorrently immoral. That is an entirely unreasonable and absurd conclusion. Of course it takes more effort to produce valuable information than to copy it. That is the whole point of copyright; it protects creators and encourages people to create their own works. In doing so, creators contribute to higher quality of life for everyone by earning an income in exchange for putting the fruits of their labor down on paper.

MacsHeadroom 7y ago

Information freedom radicalism is not in any way mutually exclusive with compensating creators. Grants, shareware, donationware, donation subscriptions (like patreon), crowdfunding, and the list goes on and on- of all the ways information creation is compensated prior to the information being given away for free. Copying information takes virtually no work. It's not unreasonable to hold that the concept of "intillectual property" is morally bankrupt. Nobody here suggested creators shouldn't be compensated.

unityByFreedom 7y ago
> Nobody here suggested creators shouldn't be compensated. Sure they did, they said knowledge should be free. If it is funded, someone's got to pay for it, and that is by definition not free. If it is the government who funds it, you're paying for it through tax dollars. And, you're not paying a competitive rate, which means low quality information is coming out. edit: I'm done with this comment chain of people claiming free doesn't mean $0. It clearly did in the original comment to which I replied, where they said "I am of the opinion knowledge should be free and easily accessible."
- MacsHeadroom 7y ago
  You're mixing up free of cost with free as in liberty. Information freedom is about liberating access to information not demonitizing creators. In the context of freedom of information the opposite of free information is not funded information- it's censored, withheld, horded, etc.
  - unityByFreedom 7y ago
    The market withholds food when they tell you to pay first before taking it home. The same is fair for an author. You don't need to fear paywalls. You're capable of learning and creating the same knowledge as any other person.
    - MacsHeadroom 7y ago

jsilence 7y ago

Usually the work of the creators has already been paid for by public finding. Research grants etc..

dionyziz 7y ago

I'm a researcher. I write the articles in their books. They don't pay me for that. All of the articles are written by people like me. All of the articles are reviewed and edited by people like me. I even do the typesetting. I get paid by a tax-funded university. Publishers (such as Springer) use their money not to produce knowledge, but to sue people, market their conferences and journals, and pay their administrators and shareholders.

czzr 7y ago
Hmm... so you get nothing for it, you do all the work and yet you continue to do it? I presume you must be getting something out of the arrangement, else why on earth do you continue?
- cyphar 7y ago
  Having papers published in journals (especially prestigious ones like Nature) is how you attain status in the research community. Also most research institutions have some expectation that you will publish N papers a year on average (because it also enhances their status).
- ggrrhh_ta 7y ago
  As many of us doing research, writing, reviewing, typesetting, checking proofs, organizing their dissemination conferences, administrative tasks, filling up IP forms, returning them, getting them checked by attorneys paid on our side, etc., etc., etc., do not get absolutely anything remotely in value to the price it costs to our institutions or peers to access our work. We force ourselves though to do something so illogical and nonsensical because we are evaluated according to inefficient and silly performance bars that emerge from a herd of seemingly intelligent people each acting in their best interest (both those that seek showing their merit, and those that seek evaluating the merit of others), most of which do not have enough power and/or leadership to be the first ones to disrupt the current status quo. ['Tradegy of the Commons' theme] Of course, I would not suggest any student to try to subvert it, as doing it "heroically" will only constitute an obstacle for themselves without doing anything to convince your rightly-so competitive peers to join your efforts rather than to overtake you. [edited: sentence corrected] However, things are slowly changing, as people & institutions with the right amount of power and leadership are starting to take action.

layoutIfNeeded 7y ago

And how exactly do publishers contribute to said work? Research is done by researchers; papers are written by researchers; and papers are reviewed by other researchers for free...

rndgermandude 7y ago

The research is already funded differently, usually through (public) grants, salaries of the researchers and everybody on their teams (taxes, tuition), or even patent revenues. Nobody makes money off of publications except for the publishers. Some publishers even demand money from the authors for their publishing "services". The publishers themselves add very little value, as e.g. peer reviews are done for "free" (aka on the universities or peer-reviewers dime), or rather for the prestige that comes from being a reviewer. What's more, a lot of the authors of what's published actually want to publish their work for everybody else to see. But they are currently caught between a rock and a hard place: they need the "reputation" that comes from publishing in "prestigious" journals but those journals or rather the parent publishing companies require signing a contract saying that the article may not be published elsewhere, not even on the authors personal website. In short, the actual research work has been paid for already, academics (authors and peer reviewers) are fucked, the public (who often paid for the research already) is fucked, and the publishers are money-printing-machines. You could easily replace the publishers with a few non-profit orgs that are funded by universities for a couple of hundred bucks per university per month, and make all the content available for "free" to everybody on the planet in perpetuity. There are over 25,000 universities worldwide, so if every university paid e.g. 200 bucks a month, it would come out as $5M per month, which is enough to fund the publishing end of every last scientific journal in existence and then some (assuming we keep not paying authors and peer reviewers through such publishing, like it is now) If I was the regulator in charge, the first thing I would do is require all work that is - in part - paid for by public taxpayer funds or public university funds to be published under a free license, since the public already paid for the work. Similar to e.g. works created by US government - and some other governments - is automatically in the public domain already; that's why e.g. all those nice NASA pictures are "freely" available to everybody already, because the US federal tax payers already paid about $35 bucks on average per year to fund ALL of NASA.

unityByFreedom 7y ago
> The research is already funded differently Yes, I understand the hatred for academic publishers b/c they don't fund the research. The comment above said 'knowledge should be free' and that is what I was responding to.