5 ms·
This is really a problem with our government. The NSF is shrinking and is now too small to support the number of physical scientists in the US. If funding were
by acadien 13y ago
This is really a problem with our government. The NSF is shrinking and is now too small to support the number of physical scientists in the US. If funding were prevalent and actually scaled with the size of academia then people wouldn't be so desperate to make a show of their research. It is common practice to claim your research will result in magical leaps in technology, such as curing cancer while making cars more fuel efficient, essentially lying to get funding. On a side note, this is one of the reasons why science news articles are often so far fetched and inaccurate.
Certainly making journals free and open is a step in the right direction, it reduces the financial strain on Universities and researchers. It also the opens the doors for amateur scientists to do solid independent (predominately theoretical) work.
I should be clear though, we already have a kind of crowd sourcing system in place: taxes and government funding agencies. The solution isn't to implement crowd sourcing, that would be like putting a band-aid on a leaky submarine. The solution is to correct the system we already have in place.
A central problem with crowd sourcing directly to the public is that the public _cannot_ be swayed to fund science that isn't sexy. A portion of fundamental science is actually pretty dull and difficult to explain, but needs to be done for the sake of progress.
- Anon84 13y ago> Certainly making journals free and open is a step in the > right direction, it reduces the financial strain on > Universities and researchers. It also the opens the doors > for amateur scientists to do solid independent > (predominately theoretical) work. Actually, open acess journals are more expensive to univeristies and scientists. Instead of the university paying for a fixed subscription fee out of the "overhead money" it collects, the scientists themselves have to py a fee per paper published out of their own grants. http://www.plos.org/publish/pricing-policy/publication-fees/ http://www.plos.org/publish/pricing-policy/publication-fees/ This clearly penalizes funding strapped researchers and even those who are more productive. Those $2900 per paper adds up quickly. Edit: formatting
- cowsandmilk 13y agoNothing prevents the university from paying publication fees out of overhead. In fact, many universities do so. Additionally, it should also be pointed out that eLife, where Randy is the Editor-in-Chief, is open access and does not charge publication fees. http://elife.elifesciences.org/publishing-fees http://elife.elifesciences.org/publishing-fees
- Anon84 13y agoYes, what I mean is that per paper publications fees can easily add up to more than the regular subscription fees.
- acadien 13y agoI can't defend PLOS's publication fees, I don't know anything about them. I can say it costs roughly ~$5000 to make a journal article open access in most journals I am familiar with. So $2500 doesn't seem so bad, although it is clearly way too high. There is also the question of whether these are optional fees.