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If we put actual books aside... paying taxes, so that researchers get grant money and can write an article should be enough... having to pay to access an articl
by ajsnigrutin 3y ago
If we put actual books aside... paying taxes, so that researchers get grant money and can write an article should be enough... having to pay to access an article about the research you already paid for is.. well.. stupid.
- robertlagrant 3y agoI agree, although I'd rather pay for things that would be useful to me and not pay for the rest than pay for everything through taxes.
- lapetitejort 3y agoThat would be useful if I could prove definitively that something is not useful for me, and will never be useful for me for the rest of my life. I would hate to owe back-taxes on something I scoffed at in a younger time.
- robertlagrant 3y agoIf you really believe that then you should be constantly giving your money to every idea. Just in case!
- actionfromafar 3y agoIs that more from a general reluctance to pay for anyone else's benefit, in general, or more from the conviction that what's not useful to you can't possibly be good for anyone else either? (Or something third or other option I'm missing right now?)
- robertlagrant 3y agoThe third option is the one that would've stopped millions of people starving in China and Russia: centralising decision-making in government does not make for better decisions.
- hackernewds 3y agoIf our government contributed to famine alleviation in Russia, and that funneled money away from addressing the homeless crisis in San Francisco, how would that make you feel?
- actionfromafar 3y agoThat’s a large trolley you got there.
- kergonath 3y agoWhat makes you believe that companies would be any better? I am astounded every time someone says something like this. Companies do not care about public good and are not your friends. They are not magically efficient structures run by super-human wizards. They are run by the same greedy psychopaths, except that you cannot vote them out. To stay on the subject: what incentive would a private company have to sell their books at a reasonable price when they could just find a niche and seek rent? This is not hypothetical, it’s exactly what they are doing. What the fuck does this have to do with China?
- robertlagrant 3y agoExcept you cannot vote them out? It's the other way round. You don't have to vote between two candidates, who have a thousand positions each. If a company is doing badly, you don't give it your money. That's far more powerful and precise feedback than political voting. The incentive companies (unlike governments) have to lower prices is competition. If competition is not happening, then that needs fixing. If competition is happening, but the journals are providing enough value that no one can compete usefully, then I don't see what can fix that, as that doesn't sound broken. As for China, if you read the comments you'll see someone broadened the scope of the conversation.
- actionfromafar 3y agoGood luck voting with your money if there’s no government with a monopoly of violence.
- meindnoch 3y agoDo you know what basic research means?
- robertlagrant 3y agoI have no idea what your comment means. Any question like this, while it might appear good in a tweet or a Marvel script, isn't actually very helpful in furthering discussion.
- gekoxyz 3y agowell, most of that money goes to the publishers not to the researchers, so...
- ebiester 3y agoThe researchers get none of the money. Quick tip: You can often email a researcher and they will sometimes send a pre-print version of the article if you don't have access. Nobody is making money off this. Other than public scholars, academic books rarely make enough to even consider it minimum wage.
- kergonath 3y ago> You can often email a researcher and they will sometimes send a pre-print version of the article if you don't have access. Most of us would send the final published version with proper formatting. It’s not even subversive, it’s something included in the non-commercial uses of the license agreements. Here’s Elsevier, but the others are similar: https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/copyright https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/copyright . TL;DR: sending pdfs is perfectly ok; what they don’t want is uploading them to servers (which is perfectly ok morally but not so legally (yet)).
- dmd 3y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoUGiS1LeKU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoUGiS1LeKU