4 ms·

The added value of publishers is more than just the editing. Why do you think a published paper is "worth" more than a pdf on a random website? - Almost nobody

by jpfr 12y ago

The added value of publishers is more than just the editing. Why do you think a published paper is "worth" more than a pdf on a random website? - Almost nobody in academia is willing to publish in substandard journals only because they are open access. The publishing process is a necessary filter for people to select what is important enough to read. - You _need_ publishers that make a profit and stay healthy over centuries. If Elsevier went bancrupt, they could no longer take care for their archives. And in the long run, we would loose access to several hundred years of research.

p4bl0 12y ago
This is bullshit. It's a problem in the first place that these archives are held by a private company. Why do they keep it centuries of it by the way? Because they hold the copyrights of the articles, but isn't that supposed to dissolve at some point in time after the death of the authors? The enormous amount of public money thrown away at publishers by each individual country is more than enough to conserve all the archives of all the published papers, past, present, and future. If Elsevier went bankrupt, and actually even if it does not, we should have them hand over the archives so that they are taken care of by public institutions who will not put barriers around their contents. Also, you imply that "open access publication = substandard publication", which is entirely wrong. There are countless counterexamples.
- jpfr 12y ago
  I choose my words carefully. Please read them carefully. 1. My argument was never about the quality of open-access journals. Given the choice between a closed journal and a "lesser" open-access journal, most (but not all) authors would still try to publish in the closed one. There are highly regarded open access journals. But they are comparatively few. 2. The publishers already retain the rights of hundreds of years of published papers. They will not give that away to some (governmental or otherwise) science-preservation organisation. So the only way to "safe" these results is to keep the publishers alive. I would like the world to be different. And I would have loved to see aaron swartz "liberating" more paper archives. But that is a different story.
  - p4bl0 12y ago
    Okay for your first point. But I do not agree with your second point, I don't see what is the problem. Of course they won't agree! Who cares? The law could force them to hand the archive over. And if they don't, public authorities could help to enforce such a law, even if a physical intervention is necessary to take the archives of humanity's knowledge back from them. I know this sounds "too much" for most people, but for me the current situation is not acceptable.
vertex-four 12y ago
> If Elsevier went bancrupt, they could no longer take care for their archives. I could think of more than a few entities that would love to take over their archives. archive.org would likely volunteer, and it's in the interests of every single university and corporate entity that uses these papers that they continue to exist. I could very easily see universities agreeing to share the storage of the archives. If the end goal is to have guaranteed storage of these papers... why on earth is a for-profit company which could theoretically go bust despite all best efforts in charge of looking after them?
- jpfr 12y ago
  Well, that's a "historically grown" situation. You cannot just take intellectual property away from some company. And if a single country tries, they just hand the rights over to the next-best subsidiary on the other side of the world.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - vertex-four 12y ago
    > You cannot just take intellectual property away from some company. If the company's about to die, why not? Your argument only works when the company's still going strong. If it's never going to actually make money with its IP, it's entirely illogical for it to spend huge amounts of effort trying to prevent that IP from being made public.
- guan 12y ago
  JSTOR is the default entity that would take care of archives. They provide access to articles older than 5 years (in most cases) for many journals from both commercial and academic publishers.

by jpfr 12y ago

p4bl0 12y ago

This is bullshit. It's a problem in the first place that these archives are held by a private company. Why do they keep it centuries of it by the way? Because they hold the copyrights of the articles, but isn't that supposed to dissolve at some point in time after the death of the authors? The enormous amount of public money thrown away at publishers by each individual country is more than enough to conserve all the archives of all the published papers, past, present, and future. If Elsevier went bankrupt, and actually even if it does not, we should have them hand over the archives so that they are taken care of by public institutions who will not put barriers around their contents. Also, you imply that "open access publication = substandard publication", which is entirely wrong. There are countless counterexamples.

jpfr 12y ago
I choose my words carefully. Please read them carefully. 1. My argument was never about the quality of open-access journals. Given the choice between a closed journal and a "lesser" open-access journal, most (but not all) authors would still try to publish in the closed one. There are highly regarded open access journals. But they are comparatively few. 2. The publishers already retain the rights of hundreds of years of published papers. They will not give that away to some (governmental or otherwise) science-preservation organisation. So the only way to "safe" these results is to keep the publishers alive. I would like the world to be different. And I would have loved to see aaron swartz "liberating" more paper archives. But that is a different story.
- p4bl0 12y ago
  Okay for your first point. But I do not agree with your second point, I don't see what is the problem. Of course they won't agree! Who cares? The law could force them to hand the archive over. And if they don't, public authorities could help to enforce such a law, even if a physical intervention is necessary to take the archives of humanity's knowledge back from them. I know this sounds "too much" for most people, but for me the current situation is not acceptable.

vertex-four 12y ago

> If Elsevier went bancrupt, they could no longer take care for their archives. I could think of more than a few entities that would love to take over their archives. archive.org would likely volunteer, and it's in the interests of every single university and corporate entity that uses these papers that they continue to exist. I could very easily see universities agreeing to share the storage of the archives. If the end goal is to have guaranteed storage of these papers... why on earth is a for-profit company which could theoretically go bust despite all best efforts in charge of looking after them?

jpfr 12y ago
Well, that's a "historically grown" situation. You cannot just take intellectual property away from some company. And if a single country tries, they just hand the rights over to the next-best subsidiary on the other side of the world.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- vertex-four 12y ago
  > You cannot just take intellectual property away from some company. If the company's about to die, why not? Your argument only works when the company's still going strong. If it's never going to actually make money with its IP, it's entirely illogical for it to spend huge amounts of effort trying to prevent that IP from being made public.
guan 12y ago
JSTOR is the default entity that would take care of archives. They provide access to articles older than 5 years (in most cases) for many journals from both commercial and academic publishers.