All those "publisher" middlemen can go eat dirt and I would be happy to shovel more dirt on them until they are 6 feet under. They do no work, take all the profit, and obstruct research and the spread of knowledge. Those are some of the worst scums of capitalism.
(We see particular fields switching over to focusing on paper distribution through preprint archives rather than journals; but just using preprints for distribution doesn't solve the problem that journals solve — which is having a sports-like "hierarchy of prestigious competitions" where a paper can either "make it" to being published in the journal that's that field's equivalent to the Olympics, or it can "get stuck" publishing in some "bush league" journal; where this informs, as a first-gloss heuristic, how much attention you should pay to trying to understand the point the paper is making.)
A big issue is funding bodies/grant reviewers are mostly old guard who are happy with the status quo. Recently, a big journal was changing in a way that upset a large swath of such people. Unfortunately i can't remember what journal. But it was obvious they benefited substantially as they're more established.
There are several reasons why this has not happened.
1. The most important, researchers are not publishers and are already completely overloaded with other work (most academics typically work 60h+ a week). They neither have the time not expertise to get this started and make no mistake there would be a significant effort required to get this started.
2. There is a certain percentage of researchers who are quite happy with the status quo. These are typically the very successful researchers which don't lack funding so don't see a problem with this (obviously there are exceptions) . Unfortunately they are often also the ones who have a disproportionate influence so if they are not on board the effort is much harder.
3. The vast majority of researchers highly depends on publications in high impact journals for their grants, careers, jobs... (for younger researchers a publication in e.g. Nature can really set off your career). For a new journal to get a high impact takes at least several years, so this is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Before the journal has the high impact most can't afford to send their best work there, but without that work you don't get the impact.
I am not knowledgeable, but it looks like just game theory.
Ideally, I would wish you to publish in open access while I reap the immediate career benefits of publishing in a prestige journal.
Amen. Pure rent seeking parasites.
Journals without fees (or lower fees) are available. Why don’t researchers publish in those?
Presumably because the journals that charge high fees offer something the lower cost ones don’t.
People like naking comparison to natural selection, hierarchies and food chains.
However they mistakenly believe that Lion is at the top of the food chain. Then they start discussing irrelevant issues, like if lion is being too mean to the herbivores.
Their understanding is fundamentally wrong - the lion is not at the top. The parasites that live in the lion are at the top.
The punlishers are parasites. They are at the top.
How does nature remove parasites, say tapeworms? It doesn't, only extenral intervention like surgery can remove them.
Presumably there is an evolutionary arms race going on between host and parasite.
In some sense attaching a high cost to a paper is a crude way of proving the quality of the paper. Putting all of the cost with the authors is clearly not ideal, because you'd only measure how much someone is willing to pay to get it published. By placing the cost with the people reading the article you ensure that the publisher must ensure their articles are actually worth reading.
The fact that getting incentives to align requires a random party to get large profits without actually doing much is a quirk of capitalism. If you ignore the concept of private property for a bit you'll see that the obvious solution is to simply burn up the excess money (capitalists would attempt to sustain the illusion that money is indelible and privately owned by viewing this as a tax).
And most researchers want their papers to be free, to the point where you can email them and they will give you a free copy, and they post the preprints on arXiv and their personal website to get around publishing requirements.
The activity we need to fund is the research itself. If we don’t allow profiteering from publishers, let’s not pretend would ever see the papers or that the research wouldn’t happen.
I'm not sure where you get this idea that they are doing any significant typesetting, or that their administrative costs are anything remotely reasonable - even the journal editors are also largely unpaid (because being the editor of a journal can be helpful when trying to get a job in academia).
100% this – if tax money fuels it, it belongs to the public, end of story.
On a balance I think it simplifies a lot if most that information is just shared generously and openly. The funders can often get a head start on gains from technical applications anyway, though better access to the researchers and infrastructure built up for the purpose.
Some economically strong nations have a habit of recruiting researchers away from their original setting around the point in time when it becomes obvious that their work is valuable though. Maybe that shouldn't always be happening without restrictions?
Not much different to Australia funding Trove.
Why the hostility?
There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.
That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.
“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.
Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.
Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.
But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.
Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.
There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.
With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?
Aaron Swartz July 2008, Eremo, Italy
There are a lot of smart people who do research and write papers about what they discover. But sometimes, these papers are not easily available for everyone to read. They might be behind a paywall or take a long time to become available. Well, now the European Union (EU) wants to change that. They want all research papers that are paid for with public money to be available right away for everyone to read, without any fees. They also want to support ways of publishing these papers that don't cost money. This could be a big change for how research papers are shared with the world!
