6 ms·

Just friendly remember that Open access publishing is the new business model that is more lucrative for publishing industry and it is basically a tax on researc

by elashri 10mo ago

Just friendly remember that Open access publishing is the new business model that is more lucrative for publishing industry and it is basically a tax on research activities but paid to private entities and mostly paid by taxpayer money (part of grant money goes to that). That's because as another commenter says now authors pays high fees (thousands of dollars) in advance, while at the same time peer reviewers and sometimes even editors are not paid. And of course in neither case (open or closed access) authors get a dime.

tokai 10mo ago
Open Access is not a business model for the publishers. They have build different ways of sucking fees out of authors when shifting to Open Access. But its FUD to claim that it's an issue with Open Access. OA is a question of licensing and copyright, nothing more. Muddling the publishers business practices with the movement to ensure free and open access to research literature is destructive and ultimately supporting the publishers, whom has been working hard for decades to dilute the concept.
- elashri 10mo ago
  I don't disagree that the ultimate goal is have open and free access is a noble goal. I just point our that what is happening in practice is that it is being taken as a new business model that pays on average more for the publishers. I'm not sure my comment implies I criticize the open access concept and I apologize if it is not clear.
seanhunter 10mo ago
I have no idea what the normal process is but I have never been paid for any peer review I've ever done and none of those was for an open access publication.
privong 10mo ago
> Open access publishing is the new business model that is more lucrative for publishing industry and it is basically a tax on research activities but paid to private entities and mostly paid by taxpayer money In addition to what @tokai said, I think it's also important to keep in mind that before Open Access the journal publishers charged subscription fees. The subscription fees were paid by universities and that was also likely largely taxpayer funded (e.g., using money from overheads charged to grants).
- tialaramex 10mo ago
  And under that model the publishers would also do all the scummy things you're familiar with if you've been say a cable TV subscriber. For example bundling four crap things with one good thing and saying that's a 5-for-1 offer when actually it's just an excuse to increase the price of the thing you actually wanted. This isn't the golden age we might have hoped for, but open access is actually a desirable outcome even if as usual Capitalism tries to deliver the worst possible version for the highest possible price.
  - 2cynykyl 10mo ago
    "Capitalism tries to deliver the worst possible version for the highest possible price" This is brilliant. So much information packed into one sentence.
strangattractor 10mo ago
Authors where paid to do the research and publish their work that produced the paper (that is what the grant was for). PLoS an Open Access publisher pays editors, type sets the work, finds a reviewer and publishes the work for free access on the internet. Reviewers are the ones that generally do not get paid for their work. Elsevier makes over $3 billion dollars with the closed publication model. They force institutions to pay for bundles of journals they do not want. The Institutions often do not supply access to the general public despite the papers being produced with public money (and despite many of the Institutions being funded by public money). Paying the cost upfront from the grant increases the availability to the public.
- dfsegoat 10mo ago
  It seems that perhaps neither are inherently 'good models'? What would an ideal alternative look like?
  - ajjahs 10mo ago
    non profit publisher or even better a goverment service.
    - bee_rider 10mo ago
      Why was this comment flagged? There’s plenty of room to disagree with it, sure, but it isn’t offensive or repulsive or anything. If anything, I’d love to see it argued against…
      - Jtsummers 10mo ago
        It wasn't flagged, they're shadowbanned. [dead] without [flagged] is not the same as [flagged][dead]. [dead] alone is shadowbanned or maybe mod killed, [flagged][dead] means that it was flagged to death by users. They (or someone) needs to message the mods about it, it looks like they've been shadowbanned since their first comment 6 months ago.
igornotarobot 10mo ago
> Just friendly remember that Open access publishing is the new business model that is more lucrative for publishing industry and it is basically a tax on research activities but paid to private entities and mostly paid by taxpayer money... While I do not disagree with this statement, this makes a significant difference for the citizens who do not happen to work in academia. Before open access, the journals would try to charge me $30-50 per article, which is ridiculous, it's a price of a textbook. Since my taxes fund public research in any case, I would prefer to be able to read the papers. I would also love to be able to watch the talks at academic conferences, which are, to very large extent, paid by the authors, too.
- bigfishrunning 10mo ago
  Where are you getting such inexpensive textbooks??? Kidding, i agree $30-50 per article is outrageous.
  - stuffn 10mo ago
    Yeah was about to say the last textbook I paid for was $380 dollars and it was a custom edition where the author was also the professor. The entire education system is a racket.
observationist 10mo ago
We need a taxpayer funded PDF host similar to arxiv where all taxpayer funded research gets published, and if journals want to license the content to publish themselves, they pay a fee to the official platform. It'd cost a couple hundred grand a year, take ~3 people to operate full time. You could even make it self-funding by pricing publishing rights toward costs, and any overflow each year would go back to grants, or upgrades. It should be free and open access, no registration, no user tracking, no data collection, no social features, just a simple searchable paper host that serves as official record and access. You'd need a simple payment portal for publishing rights, but fair use and linking to the official public host would allow people to link and discuss elsewhere. It's not a hard technical problem, it's not expensive. We do things the stupid, difficult, convoluted way, because that's where bad faith actors get to pretend they're providing something of value in return for billions of dollars.
- bondarchuk 10mo ago
  I think the big missing thing in any proposed or actual fully open system is it does away with the difference between "prestigious" and "non-prestigious" journals. "Prestigiousness" is actually a really useful signal and it seems really difficult to recreate from the ground up in an open and fair system. It's almost like "prestige" can only emerge in a system of selfish/profit-motivated actors.
  - bee_rider 10mo ago
    It is a kind of fuzzy signal though. Maybe a better replacement could be found. Like, if we all had PGP keys, we could just sign the article that we like, right? Then, a web-of-prestige that more accurately represents the field could be generated. ORCID could manage it, haha.
    - warkdarrior 10mo ago
      Publishing collusion rings would greatly enjoy using this web-of-prestige: https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/a-massive-fraud-ring-is-publishing-thousands-of-fake-studies-and-the-problem-is-exploding-these-networks-are-essentially-criminal-organizations/ https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/a-massive-fr...
pks016 10mo ago
Open access paradox. As an author, I hate gold open access journals. My supervisor doesn't have money (~3000 CAD nowadays) to pay for publishing. He says he would rather pay for my or other grad students' summer salary Each time I spent hours searching an appropriate journal for my research. As time goes on, I feel like research is only for very wealthy people.
DoctorOetker 10mo ago
but what prevents scientists (as both authors and reviewers) from banding together and creating journals that don't require money (freeing money for research budgets)?
IanCal 10mo ago
I like the way that people add “a friendly reminder” like they’re just jogging your memory of a well known fact. Publishers have been fighting OA for an incredibly long time. They are not foisting this on people because it’s a new great scheme they’ve come up with, they have been pushed to do it.

by elashri 10mo ago

tokai 10mo ago

Open Access is not a business model for the publishers. They have build different ways of sucking fees out of authors when shifting to Open Access. But its FUD to claim that it's an issue with Open Access. OA is a question of licensing and copyright, nothing more. Muddling the publishers business practices with the movement to ensure free and open access to research literature is destructive and ultimately supporting the publishers, whom has been working hard for decades to dilute the concept.

elashri 10mo ago
I don't disagree that the ultimate goal is have open and free access is a noble goal. I just point our that what is happening in practice is that it is being taken as a new business model that pays on average more for the publishers. I'm not sure my comment implies I criticize the open access concept and I apologize if it is not clear.

seanhunter 10mo ago

I have no idea what the normal process is but I have never been paid for any peer review I've ever done and none of those was for an open access publication.

privong 10mo ago

> Open access publishing is the new business model that is more lucrative for publishing industry and it is basically a tax on research activities but paid to private entities and mostly paid by taxpayer money In addition to what @tokai said, I think it's also important to keep in mind that before Open Access the journal publishers charged subscription fees. The subscription fees were paid by universities and that was also likely largely taxpayer funded (e.g., using money from overheads charged to grants).

tialaramex 10mo ago
And under that model the publishers would also do all the scummy things you're familiar with if you've been say a cable TV subscriber. For example bundling four crap things with one good thing and saying that's a 5-for-1 offer when actually it's just an excuse to increase the price of the thing you actually wanted. This isn't the golden age we might have hoped for, but open access is actually a desirable outcome even if as usual Capitalism tries to deliver the worst possible version for the highest possible price.
- 2cynykyl 10mo ago
  "Capitalism tries to deliver the worst possible version for the highest possible price" This is brilliant. So much information packed into one sentence.

strangattractor 10mo ago

Authors where paid to do the research and publish their work that produced the paper (that is what the grant was for). PLoS an Open Access publisher pays editors, type sets the work, finds a reviewer and publishes the work for free access on the internet. Reviewers are the ones that generally do not get paid for their work. Elsevier makes over $3 billion dollars with the closed publication model. They force institutions to pay for bundles of journals they do not want. The Institutions often do not supply access to the general public despite the papers being produced with public money (and despite many of the Institutions being funded by public money). Paying the cost upfront from the grant increases the availability to the public.

dfsegoat 10mo ago
It seems that perhaps neither are inherently 'good models'? What would an ideal alternative look like?
- ajjahs 10mo ago
  non profit publisher or even better a goverment service.
  - bee_rider 10mo ago
    Why was this comment flagged? There’s plenty of room to disagree with it, sure, but it isn’t offensive or repulsive or anything. If anything, I’d love to see it argued against…
    - Jtsummers 10mo ago
      It wasn't flagged, they're shadowbanned. [dead] without [flagged] is not the same as [flagged][dead]. [dead] alone is shadowbanned or maybe mod killed, [flagged][dead] means that it was flagged to death by users. They (or someone) needs to message the mods about it, it looks like they've been shadowbanned since their first comment 6 months ago.

igornotarobot 10mo ago

> Just friendly remember that Open access publishing is the new business model that is more lucrative for publishing industry and it is basically a tax on research activities but paid to private entities and mostly paid by taxpayer money... While I do not disagree with this statement, this makes a significant difference for the citizens who do not happen to work in academia. Before open access, the journals would try to charge me $30-50 per article, which is ridiculous, it's a price of a textbook. Since my taxes fund public research in any case, I would prefer to be able to read the papers. I would also love to be able to watch the talks at academic conferences, which are, to very large extent, paid by the authors, too.

bigfishrunning 10mo ago
Where are you getting such inexpensive textbooks??? Kidding, i agree $30-50 per article is outrageous.
- stuffn 10mo ago
  Yeah was about to say the last textbook I paid for was $380 dollars and it was a custom edition where the author was also the professor. The entire education system is a racket.

observationist 10mo ago

We need a taxpayer funded PDF host similar to arxiv where all taxpayer funded research gets published, and if journals want to license the content to publish themselves, they pay a fee to the official platform. It'd cost a couple hundred grand a year, take ~3 people to operate full time. You could even make it self-funding by pricing publishing rights toward costs, and any overflow each year would go back to grants, or upgrades. It should be free and open access, no registration, no user tracking, no data collection, no social features, just a simple searchable paper host that serves as official record and access. You'd need a simple payment portal for publishing rights, but fair use and linking to the official public host would allow people to link and discuss elsewhere. It's not a hard technical problem, it's not expensive. We do things the stupid, difficult, convoluted way, because that's where bad faith actors get to pretend they're providing something of value in return for billions of dollars.

bondarchuk 10mo ago
I think the big missing thing in any proposed or actual fully open system is it does away with the difference between "prestigious" and "non-prestigious" journals. "Prestigiousness" is actually a really useful signal and it seems really difficult to recreate from the ground up in an open and fair system. It's almost like "prestige" can only emerge in a system of selfish/profit-motivated actors.
- bee_rider 10mo ago
  It is a kind of fuzzy signal though. Maybe a better replacement could be found. Like, if we all had PGP keys, we could just sign the article that we like, right? Then, a web-of-prestige that more accurately represents the field could be generated. ORCID could manage it, haha.
  - warkdarrior 10mo ago
    Publishing collusion rings would greatly enjoy using this web-of-prestige: https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/a-massive-fraud-ring-is-publishing-thousands-of-fake-studies-and-the-problem-is-exploding-these-networks-are-essentially-criminal-organizations/ https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/a-massive-fr...

pks016 10mo ago

Open access paradox. As an author, I hate gold open access journals. My supervisor doesn't have money (~3000 CAD nowadays) to pay for publishing. He says he would rather pay for my or other grad students' summer salary Each time I spent hours searching an appropriate journal for my research. As time goes on, I feel like research is only for very wealthy people.

DoctorOetker 10mo ago

but what prevents scientists (as both authors and reviewers) from banding together and creating journals that don't require money (freeing money for research budgets)?

IanCal 10mo ago

I like the way that people add “a friendly reminder” like they’re just jogging your memory of a well known fact. Publishers have been fighting OA for an incredibly long time. They are not foisting this on people because it’s a new great scheme they’ve come up with, they have been pushed to do it.