
We've failed: open access is winning and we must change our approach - mathgenius
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/leap.1116/full
======
infogulch
The content distribution problem is capital-s Solved. The reason why
publishers are floundering is because their product doesn't add value anymore.

As a group they have slowly been cutting out all the value-adds and buckling
down on only one thing: distribution. Distribution is not valuable anymore
because distribution _has no marginal cost_. This is classic rent-seeking. Cut
your costs so far that your business does nothing, nothing except extract rent
out of a pre-existing monopoly. This lasts exactly as long as it takes the
market to make a competitor.

How do you win against free? _Be better than free._

~~~
pinindajin
Be better than free? Exactly on point.

The reason I stopped pirating music wasn't because I thought there was
anything wrong with it.

I stopped pirating music because services like spotify have so many value adds
for such a low monthly cost that it makes sense to use their services rather
than pirate.

Spotify offered something better than free.

It's time for industries that haven't caught up with the times to start
rethinking their business model. Opinions on IP aside, piracy is going nowhere
and trying to fight the pirates based on ethics is futile.

~~~
coldtea
> _I stopped pirating music because services like spotify have so many value
> adds for such a low monthly cost that it makes sense to use their services
> rather than pirate._

That's good and all, but we can imagine a volunteer-run service that's just as
good or better than Spotify -- but it's based on piracy. We could also imagine
it reaching the pinnacle or convenience, so nothing else could be added except
marginal improvements.

Would that make using it OK -- that there's no other paid alternative that's
more convenient?

In the end somebody got to pay the artists both for the production costs and
for making a living on top of them. And I don't say every artist deserves
money just because they are an artist -- but every artist that people actually
listen to they work does deserve a cut for that.

~~~
mikeash
Whether it's OK is the wrong question. The right question is what people do,
which is largely unrelated.

You can talk about how artists need to be paid until the end of time, but that
won't change people's behavior much.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
It might when creators stop creating - which, arguably, is already happening.

There aren't many people arguing that the 2010s have been a better decade for
music than the 60s to 90s.

Of course, this assumes consumers and content distributors can join the dots -
and so far there isn't much evidence they can.

~~~
root_axis
> _It might when creators stop creating - which, arguably, is already
> happening._

This is ok, perhaps even desirable. Ultimately, the market for music is
already so oversaturated that more artists aren't really "needed" (that is to
say, there is much more than enough music to service demand, not that more
good art isn't valuable), and most non-elite artists would welcome reduced
competition.

> _There aren 't many people arguing that the 2010s have been a better decade
> for music than the 60s to 90s._

Well either way that is a totally subjective argument that cannot ever be
concluded definitively, there is _so_ much more music produced today than in
the 60s-90s that it'd be impossible to even make a fair _subjective_ judgement
regarding which decades produced "better" music. Certainly, I think everyone
can agree that stronger economic incentives do not necessarily mean better
work is produced and there are those who suggest that the opposite is true.

~~~
robryan
Stronger economic incentives may actually result in more bands/ artists being
manufactured by labels, which generally produced worse music.

Costs of prediction are pretty low now, everything except the cheapest indy
albums sounds great.

------
moyix
The repeated use of the word "pirate" here is absurd. From a moral standpoint,
the argument against piracy is that it deprives _creators_ of their
livelihood. In scientific publishing, creators (and even reviewers!) are not
compensated by publishers, and "piracy" actually helps their careers (this is
why scientists are, in general, so strongly in favor of Sci-hub). But by
abusing emotionally laden language and false comparisons with the music
industry, the author hopes to win sympathy for an industry that, honestly,
needs to radically change or die.

~~~
Iv
A few years ago, I wanted to switch my CS specialty from computer vision to
bioinformatics and biology simulation. I have always been intrested in
optimization, often wrote GPU code, found biology much more rewarding than
augmented reality.

A good researcher in the field was generous enough to guide me through the
process and gave me a list of basic and also cutting edge articles that I
should understand to be useful in the field. Coming from CS, I expected the
literature to be basically free to download from researchers webpages. Boy was
I wrong.

The guy sent me a few copies, I was at the time also working close to a uni so
I leeched a few from their library access, but this was a new field for me:
every article rests on well-known conclusions explained in another article so
I needed a ton of references, each bringing other references. Exactly like
when you start reading an article in wikipedia on a subject you don't know.

At one point I just felt ashamed of asking articles after articles and my
library (that was not specialized in biology) only had half the articles I
needed. I considered paying for them, but I needed probably at least 200
references and each was in 30 dollars range.

I quit. I am still doing computer vision. I was ready to earn less to do
research in a critical field for society, but I abandoned mostly because of
this stupid barrier, that said that not only should I be ready to earn less,
but also pay a huge rent to people I know to be parasites in order to be
allowed to help research.

Fuck that.

~~~
skrebbel
Was this before Sci-Hub existed?

~~~
Iv
Yes. There was a newsgroup (or already a subreddit?) where people asked for
articles and got answered with copies but these were usually students or
researchers stuck by a specific article they could not get. Not someone like
me who would have to ask 20 references at a time.

~~~
vanderZwan
Well, that suggests that now is a good time to at least explore things again.
Bioarxiv also exists now

------
jly
Sci-hub has been a total game changer. Plug in a DOI, get a paper. No
accounts/tracking, no payment, no looking up the journal and their access
model. Just research. The simplicity of use and ease of access is
unparalleled.

I'm not a working scientist - I have no paid-for University access to a
variety of journals or other such connections, nor do I know the intricate
details of how research is published. What I do know is that I'm a citizen
helping to fund much of this work, and access to primary literature is
critically important to make informed decisions about our future. The
academics are paid a salary to produce findings, not to sell individual copies
(unlike the music industry comparisons). While I'm willing to pay something, I
can't be expected to pay the huge costs to access individual papers that are
demanded today. Open access journals like PLOS are fantastic, but it's an
unfortunate reality that much of the quality research is published on
platforms that charge $30 for a paper. Until this changes, sci-hub is my
answer.

~~~
pishpash
It costs some money to get a DOI. Publishers can still be content aggregators
and indexers, or curators. Sci-hub is merely an archive.

~~~
sillysaurus3
Paying $30 to merely look at a paper that may or may not be valuable is
ridiculous no matter how you slice it.

~~~
closeparen
You aren't meant to pay the $30, you're meant to be inside the firewall at an
institution.

~~~
joelthelion
And that excludes 99% of taxpayers.

~~~
closeparen
Correct, but I think people are getting hung up on the price and rent-seeking
aspect. The price is a farce. Really, what's happening is the restriction of
knowledge to the ivory towers (and their VPNs).

~~~
CamelCaseName
But why is the price a farce? Why not make it some nominal amount?
Universities will still buy subscriptions.

------
neilk
If anyone is confused like I was:

"Gold open access": publish paper in a publicly accessible academic journal.

"Green open access": self-publish. For instance, throw it on a website, and
allow it to be indexed.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access)

~~~
mathgenius
""" In _gold_ open access, you write a paper and pay a big company lots of
money to give it away for free. For some reason this isn't catching on.

In _green_ open access, you publish your paper with a big company. They charge
people to read it – but you make another version available for free. This has
not caught on except in math and physics.

In _diamond_ open access, you publish your paper with a journal that's free
for you and free for the people who read it. This has also not caught on,
because most "prestigious" journals – the ones you need to publish in to get a
job – are run by companies who don't do stuff for free.

In _black_ open access, people illegally download millions of papers and books
from big companies and make them available to everyone for free. This is
working great. """ \- John Baez post on google-plus.

~~~
dredmorbius
It's a great post.

[https://plus.google.com/+johncbaez999/posts/Wto5MmfCP9o](https://plus.google.com/+johncbaez999/posts/Wto5MmfCP9o)

------
solatic
It's not that complicated. The author seems to think that academic journals
were somehow high-quality products that were co-opted by privacy. The music
industry also, once upon a time, thought that offering disks in record stores
was a high-quality offering.

Music pirates forced the music industry to realize that they were charging too
much for user-hostile formats. Publishing pirates ought to force the
publishing industry to realize that they are charging too much for user-
hostile formats, too.

The music industry started to win back market-share from pirates when they
understood that they had to compete with pirate offerings and offer a better,
higher-quality product. The results were iTunes, then Spotify and similar
competitors (Google Music etc.). The publishing industry ought to be no
exception.

~~~
trothamel
I'm not sure the academic publishing industry is going to get what little
goodwill the music industry has. With iTunes and so on, there's at least the
idea that some small fraction of the money spent is going back to the artists.

That doesn't seem to be the case with academic publishing, where you have
these purely rent-seeking corporations. Why would I want to give Elsevier my
money, when the authors of the paper don't get any of it?

That's the problem academic publishing has, making it hard to recognize sci-
hub as illegitimate.

(One of my happiest academic publishing experiences was when I wrote a paper
while working for the US government, which meant there was no copyright for
the publisher to insist on stealing from me.)

~~~
rjsw
I would prefer to see the reviewers of a paper getting paid than the authors.

I was a founder of a startup in the 80s that was part funded by Elsevier. I
spent a fair bit of time discussing the possible impact of computer networks
and graphical displays on their business model with their then CTO.

~~~
majewsky
Please go on. Your anecdote stopped before any of the interesting parts. Did
the then-CTO not see any of this coming, or did he/she just think that they
couldn't change anything one way or the other?

------
dannypgh
In my opinion, at the root of a lot of these problems is the fact that
copyright has moved from being something designed to have a very limited
duration and then expire, to something that lasts far more than a lifetime.

If copyright still expired in 14 or 28 years, we'd have a rich public domain
from which to draw from. Think about all of the "fan fiction" that could be
commercialized, or the textbooks which could be freely modified and
redistributed by students and the academic community.

Because the public domain has been cheated out of such wealth (in no small
part due to lobbying by Disney and other IP-based corporations) it really
doesn't surprise me that piracy is so popular.

~~~
Noos
What wealth? We already have plenty of public domain works, and they get
bundled 50 to 100 movies in a set for ten dollars. We already have plenty of
things you can make fan fiction of an monetize, but very little public domain
stuff gets that. There was a spate of this in comics, with people attempting
to do that with The Shadow or Green Hornet, or other lapsed properties.

What people really want to do is make money by piggybacking off established
brands that spend a lot of money to remain relevant. They don't want public
domain in general, they want disney to be stripped of copyright protections so
they can milk them dry through parasitical works.

But they don't get that once that happens, the works because worthless
precisely because no one is willing to spend more than the bare minimum on
something they can't protect. It just winds up on youtube for free; who cares
about spending money restoring or advertising for it?

~~~
dannypgh
You're telling me star wars would have never been made if Lucas only had 28
years of exclusive rights to the franchise? Please.

Here's some public domain characters that have ended up in works that have
given a lot of people entertainment: Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Frankenstein,
Dr. Dolittle... that Mickey Mouse and C3PO haven't joined this list is only
because of relatively recent extension of copyright terms, which have amounted
to a transfer of wealth towards those who didn't need more of it to be
artistically creative...

------
wyc
Information economics seem to be playing out exactly as expected. The price of
a good is reverting to its cost of production--near $0 for copying bytes. You
can't stop the rock.

In Information Rules, Shapiro & Varian argue that if you're selling an
information product, all that you can charge for is the value that you add on
top of the information, such as convenience, freshness, etc. It's best to
assume the information itself is free.

~~~
tzs
> The price of a good is reverting to its cost of production--near $0 for
> copying bytes.

That needs the word "marginal" inserted just before the word "cost".

~~~
CaptSpify
Can you explain why?

~~~
wyc
When you're making a new movie, the production of the master copy can cost
millions of dollars. Same thing with software products, songs, and digital
photos. However, making a digital copy after that is very cheap.

Therefore, it's better to say that the marginal production cost moves towards
zero instead of the total production cost, which would include the master copy
cost.

------
philjohn
They get the content for free, they get the editing for free, now that they
are digital rather than print, distribution costs almost nothing ... and then
they sell back the research to the institutions who created it in the first
place.

They're a parasite, and have been for years.

The other awful part is their "bundling" \- only want access to journals X, Y
and Z? Tough. You have to buy them in a package that includes bottom of the
barrel journals A-W as well, for a huge fee.

~~~
Fomite
Two thoughts:

\- Most of the journals I publish in do a considerable amount of layout, and I
find this to be a significant value in reading papers.

\- At least one of the academic societies I'm in is essentially financially
dependent on the income they make from allowing $Publisher to publish their
society journal. My corner of science would be considerably worse off if that
was dropped.

~~~
philjohn
They are certainly valid points, and the second one especially so, but the
current situation can't go on.

------
red_admiral
In cryptography, we've had eprint.iacr.org for a while now and if you want
your paper to get noticed, an eprint version will do more for you than a talk
at a second-tier conference. Even at first-tier conferences like Crypto,
people will sometimes have "eprint 20xx/yyy" on their last slide to encourage
people to go and read the paper.

Peer review still has direct value, and peer reviewed publications on your CV
have indirect value so the IACR conferences (and possibly Springer/LNCS)
aren't going away any time soon. But everyone I know of in the field looks on
eprint first when they actually want to read papers.

------
dragonwriter
The article and it's original title are about black open access (piracy)
winning over green (author-distributed in parallel to journal publication) and
gold (journals being paid, per article, to directly provide open access) open
access models, not about open access winning over non-open access. Taking
“black” out of the title radically changes the meaning.

------
jmcgough
Open access journals have failed in part because they lack the prestige of top
tier journals like cell or nature

~~~
zizek23
The business model of journals seem to be particularly perverse and
artificial. The universities not only have more brand value and credibility
but also the resources to publish journals themselves.

It's interesting how the journals managed to get a monopoly on this over 50
years. There seems to little reason for a private entity to be able to inject
themselves here and take control of public output.

It's like the public paying for oil exploration with private companies like
Exxon Mobil stepping in when it is found to take control and sell the oil.
This doesn't seem to have anything to do with capitalism or any ism, it looks
like pure theft.

~~~
cinquemb
> _It 's interesting how the journals managed to get a monopoly on this over
> 50 years. There seems to little reason for a private entity to be able to
> inject themselves here and take control of public output._

I think it's symbiotic relationship between universities. Universities get
together and decide who to pay to distribute their "best" research, in effect
creating a prestige/walled garden affect surrounding academic publishing,
raising the barrier for non well monied researchers having access to the
audience.

If universities decided that they would no longer publish in nature et al.,
and just put publications on arvix or something, then the monopoly would
effectively die, but It's not in their interest to do so since universities
will have to compete on mind-share on what papers attract the most interest in
a field and chip away at the advantages they have today.

Long term though, universities will loose their advantage as it becomes easier
to engage and propagate knowledge outside of such.

------
CamperBob2
"After all, the pirates have long since been chased out of the music business
(Gapper, 2017)."

The pirates were doing the chasing. Without the pirates, we wouldn't have
multiple competing services that grant unlimited access to practically every
note of commercial recorded music for a very modest amount of money.

If scientific publishing had a Spotify or Apple Music, then there would be no
need for a sci-hub. Your move, Wiley.

------
allenz
Title, together with the domain, is very misleading. The impression is that
Wiley is admitting defeat against open access. Instead, the author (not
affiliated with Wiley) regrets that piracy is winning over open access.

------
amigoingtodie
Are the pursuits of knowledge and profit in conflict?

~~~
koiz
Yes.

They have been for decades.

Thankfully the internet created another door, but we'll see how long that
lasts...

~~~
SmellTheGlove
> Thankfully the internet created another door, but we'll see how long that
> lasts...

Can't put the toothpaste back into the tube. The interesting thing about the
Internet is that its creators were either unaware, didn't care, or more
likely, didn't see as negative (regarding the economic impacts) they were
creating something that would eliminate scarcity of information. Everyone else
observing either shared that lack of awareness in slowing the train, or was
not able to foresee the practical impacts.

Any attempt to put the brakes on now is going to be a net economic loss.
Profit-seeking entities have an interest in preserving the internet as-is,
even if they make occasional short term decisions counter to that (like
abandoning net neutrality).

The handful of industries that profit entirely off of information scarcity
will either adjust or go away. They really should spend their money finding
new value streams rather than fighting piracy. That's not winnable.

~~~
Angostura
And once the publishing, movie and music industries have 'gone away, together
with the authors, artist and producers who rely on them for a living, what
kind of world will that be?

~~~
SmellTheGlove
There's a demand for content. Some of the distribution value proposition is in
question. I don't think entire industries will disappear, but I do think there
will be winners and losers based on who adjusts.

As someone else in this thread said - you gotta be better than free. That's
true in many cases. Music is a great example - it's more convenient to buy or
subscribe than it is to pirate it.

------
CryoLogic
I spent over $1,000 one quarter on books because I couldn't buy ANY of my
books used as they all had half of the content in one-time online codes. Even
worse, the online codes expire every quarter.

~~~
HarryHirsch
Complain to your university's administration that the faculty is outsourcing
assessment to the textbook company. The access codes are a racket, but they
are a _convenient_ racket, because the university doesn't have to hire extra
faculty or assistants for grading tests and running tutorials, teaching
faculty is seriously overburdened.

It's really bad and has gotten worse in the last 20 years. This is a standard
text for advanced undergraduate organic chemistry:
[https://www.amazon.com/-/dp/0387683461](https://www.amazon.com/-/dp/0387683461)

USD 35 on Amazon plus another USD 35 for its sister volume, good for all Orgo
courses that an undergraduate might choose to take. A new edition would come
out every 8 - 10 years. Solid. Good addition to the personal library when
working in the field. Over 2500 pages altogether. Whoever says that isn't a
fair deal is lying.

This is the slim-down-rip-off introductory textbook edition:
[https://www.amazon.com/-/dp/0073402745/](https://www.amazon.com/-/dp/0073402745/)

USD 268, but you get an access code. And a new edition seemingly every other
year, as if the content in introductory courses changed that fast. It's a
useless piece of dead tree, never to be looked at again once the course is
over.

It's the students' turn to revolt. The situation has been intolerable for a
long time.

------
gobengo
Journals and publishers should start focusing on creating value out of their
community: the authors and readers they've attracted.

[http://hypothes.is/](http://hypothes.is/) is a nonprofit that makes
annotation tech that some are using to publish peer-reviews, not just the
article. I think that's pretty cool. Give the content away for free (you have
to/should), but focus on having the best community around it.

------
dougmccune
The topic of academic journals comes up repeatedly on HN (which is great) and
is inevitably filled with an echo chamber of people saying that publishers add
zero value, produce a literally worthless product, and they should all be put
out of business. I’ve grown tired of the hyperbole, but sometimes (like now) I
try to add a bit of perspective from within the industry. FWIW I serve on the
board of SAGE, which is an independent but relatively large academic
publisher.

Publishing articles has real costs. This is not about hosting PDFs, it’s about
everything that goes into editorial curation, managing peer review, marketing
a journal to build a brand, copy editing/formatting, and then yes, finally at
the end of the day hosting a PDF. Those tasks do indeed have costs. They range
from anywhere from something on the order of $500 - $5,000 per published
article. Nobody is publishing at scale for cheaper than that. The argument
that it should only cost something like $30 to publish an article is a
complete fantasy. So if you want to argue about the value add and that all
publishers do is sit around collecting rent for doing nothing, you have to
check your hyperbole and come to the debate with reasoned arguments about the
realistic costs of performing the very real tasks that are performed.

There has never been a better time to try to be an academic publisher for
cheaper than the incumbents. The tech infrastructure is there, clearly the PR
and anti-publisher sentiment is on your side. So why aren’t there millions of
publishers springing up to publish articles for $30 a pop (or even better -
free!)? It’s because it’s not possible to do the job that’s required for free
or for that low a price. But there are literally no technical barriers to
someone trying. Come up with a complete alternative to the journal system for
publishing research, or figure out how to magically do it for free. There’s
nothing technical in your way, but there are still major hurdles. You’ll find
that doing the job a publisher does in fact involve work. You can deride that
work all you want, but you cannot deny that publisher do indeed spend the
money to do that work. So if you think that work is truly worthless you should
launch a competitor that doesn’t do any work at all.

But the biggest barrier to radical changes in business model is all cultural.
Academics are slow to change, and you cannot underestimate the importance of
reputation. So any competing product has to address the cultural role that
journals play (working as proxy for quality measurement and assessing academic
job applicants). So yes, you can put PDFs online for basically free. That’s
not the job of journals. To replace journals you have to solve the content
curation and bestowing of prestige issues in some other way. There are loads
of people trying (or startups that have died trying), and so far nothing has
done much to dislodge the journal (and particularly Impact Factor) as the sole
arbiter of academic quality. It’s a heroic task to try to tackle, because
largely I think the world would be a better place if there was some real
disruption in how academics judge other academics.

Now onto Gold OA. From my perspective Gold OA, which means the author funds
the publication of the article, typically through baking it into the research
funding grant, is making HUGE progress. Gold OA publishing is one of the
fastest growing segments (both by revenue and number of articles published)
for all major publishers — at least in STM fields. In fields where there isn’t
readily accessible grant money (the humanities and social sciences) there
isn’t nearly as much progress on Gold OA (and the path forward isn’t clear
either). But Gold OA is so mainstream now that I can imagine it gobbling up
the entirety of STM publishing in 10-20 years (god I hope before that, but
this industry moves slow).

I’m happy to talk more about academic publishing from the counter perspective
to most people here, although a lot of these discussions can be more
productive outside of the HN forum. Feel free to email me (details in
profile).

~~~
jampekka
Would you care to give a some sort of breakdown on how publishing one article
costs even $500, let alone $5000? I have tried to ask this from publishers
I've published with, but never get any real answers. Also, the obscene profit
margins reek of rent-seeking.

Authors, reviewers and mostly editors don't get paid. The "services" that the
publishers provide are mostly some outsourced minimum-paid clerk complaining
how some technical detail doesn't match some arbitrary rules arising from an
arcane system.

Before such breakdown is given, I keep on thinking you are leeching the work
of scientists and taxpayers and making the world a worse place.

~~~
dougmccune
It's mostly people costs. There's also royalties to societies (the basic deal
is academic societies own a lot of journals and license them to publishers for
a royalty on sales). And there's tech/infrastructure costs for the systems to
manage the manuscript workflow (and yes, for hosting the journal websites and
serving PDFs). And even in this modern age some journals (most still maybe?)
have some print component with costs. You can argue that's ridiculous (as I
do) but parts of the academic library market is still in love with print for
some reason.

But if you're trying to understand the real cost drivers it all comes back to
the people involved. You're totally right in that peer reviewers are almost
never paid (there are a few exceptions to this, like eLife). And often
editorial boards of journals are not paid. Although there are also a
significant amount of paid editors as well, either stipends provided to
academics or in house editors. The internal staff manages the peer review
process, which includes everything from finding reviewers to hounding
reviewers to complete reviews, etc. That peer review management gets done by a
combo of unpaid editors and paid editors.

So then there's society journals. More and more society journals have been
scooped up by the major publishers, and the academic societies rely on the
journal royalty to function. Now, you could argue (as I would) that academic
societies should figure out ways to survive without journal subscription
revenue royalties being an integral part of their finances (ie run
conferences, purely via membership fees, etc) but the current reality is that
a huge number of academic societies rely on the journal royalty to stay
afloat.

Then there's marketing. A journal lives or dies by its reputation, and
building a journal up requires a significant marketing effort to establish a
journal to drive submissions. For new OA journals that marketing spend works
very differently, and in fact requires a lot more spend on a consistent basis.
OA journals live and die by steady submission flow (since the only revenue
ever comes from accepted papers), and so you have to market the journal
constantly to ensure you drive submissions.

There are also people employed that aren't direct costs to production but are
responsible for new product ideas (R&D), and all the kinds of folks that are
required to run a large organization, like HR, people in acquisitions trying
to grow the business, people in sales, legal, etc etc.

I understand the visceral reaction against publishers. I have the same
reaction to the subscription business model to be honest. My preference would
be that the service publishers provide gets treated more like what it is - a
service to academics who choose to use it - and gets charged accordingly.
That's actually exactly what's happening with the move to Gold OA, where
authors pay for the service of publishing. IMO that's actually working pretty
well in STM, even though there's a long way to go. But unfortunately the non
STM fields in the humanities and social sciences are having a lot of trouble
in a transition like that. There are two main problems: in HSS there aren't
tons of grants that academics can use to fund publication fees, and there's a
huge, longstanding cultural assumption that publication should be free to
academics, so it's hard to convince people that the publishing service should
be bought (for any price). There are other people trying to solve this in
different ways, like the Open Library of Humanities, but nothing has had
significant success yet.

You can argue with profit levels (although I do think it's funny how much
people are against profit in certain businesses and have no problem with
profit in others, ie large tech cos). But what I object to is saying that
publishers don't provide a valuable service. The use of terms like leech and
rent-seeking imply a monopoly position and no value add whatsoever. First,
nobody (even Elsevier) has a monopoly. There are 4-5 big publishers (Elsevier,
Springer-Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, SAGE) and then a huge number of
smaller players (some of whom are substantial and highly influential, like
Oxford University Press and Cambridge). So at best you can make the argument
it's an oligopoly (although one that has about 2,000 total players).

~~~
jampekka
Sorry, but I don't accept this as a breakdown. Surely as a board member you
must know an approximate dollar amount/labor time going to different direct
production phases per article published (or submitted). Eg, how much time it
takes for the staff to manage the editors, check the manuscripts and lay them
out.

The other stuff sounds like overhead, so feel free to lump it as a single
figure.

PS. I'm not a fan of (obscene) profits in any industry. Even if one believes
in capitalism, the usual basic tenet is that no company's, let alone
industry's, profits should be able to consistently surpass the interest rate
if the market is working.

I find it sort of ridiculous when publishers throw figures like $1000 a piece
as a reasonable APC. That's over two weeks of research stipend in Finland at
least. If it takes anywhere near two workweeks to process an article and
handle the overhead, you guys really suck at what you do.

~~~
dougmccune
And yet nobody in the industry is doing the work for cheaper at scale. And the
noble non-profit players like PLOS aren't able to do it cheaper either. So
yes, you can take the stand that literally every single player in the industry
really sucks at what we do, from the large commercial publishers all the way
to the non-profits. Or you could acknowledge the alternate hypothesis, which
is that it might simply cost that much to deliver the services performed.

~~~
jampekka
PLOS's prices are ridiculous as well, and their surplus is quite staggering.

There are players like peerj that publish at the fraction of the price. Also
many smaller non-profit journals have APCs in tye range of tens of dollars.

But whatever makes you sleep at night.

Edit: Also, no breakdown given, as expected.

~~~
dougmccune
PeerJ's APC pricing is $1,095. We're actually an investor in PeerJ and are
really hoping they're a success. But they're not a counter-point to PLOS-level
APCs (they are indeed still cheaper, but not substantially anymore).

And yes, there are examples of small-scale journals charging less, or society
journals charging less/free because it's paid for by the society membership
fees. There's Tim Gowers' arXiv overlay journal. There's a bunch of small-
scale examples or anecdotes. But none of those are repeatable at the scale the
academic community needs.

You're right, I didn't give you the financial breakdown of our operating costs
that you wanted. First of all, I don't actually know the per-published-article
costs and breakdown off the top of my head. And second, I wouldn't post that
information publicly here. I guess that means you'll continue to think that we
don't do any work and collect vast sums of money, sitting in dark rooms
laughing about how we get to fuck everyone over. You clearly think every
single player in the industry is doing it wrong. I'm not going to change your
mind.

~~~
jampekka
Ah, PeerJ did the bait and switch too. Thanks for the heads up.

And yes, that's what I'll keep on thinking. I wouldn't be much of a scientist
if I'd take an industry shill's claim at face value, 'cuz secrets and all.

And I don't think you're very different from other corporate leeches. Probably
the investors take the biggest cut of in the racket, but I'm quite certain
many of the minions get compensated quite well too. Plenty of those in the
academia as well.

~~~
dougmccune
You can call it bait and switch, but the reality is simple and not nearly as
nefarious, it's just about trying to find a sustainable business model. It's
either that or go out of business. There's no grand cabal running a conspiracy
that forces players like PLOS and PeerJ to raise their prices. They're just
trying to stay alive, and they price their product to do so, just like
literally every other corporation in the world.

~~~
jampekka
"Staying alive" meaning paying those yachts? If PLOS pays out hundreds of
thousands to its execs, I can only imagine the gluttony going on in the for-
profit scams. And they have to make those rich investors richer for being rich
on top of it!

------
yk
> After all, the pirates have long since been chased out of the music business
> (Gapper, 2017).

Did somebody tell the pirates?

~~~
infogulch
That quote is plain wrong. The pirates weren't chased out of the music
business. While they have declined, they still exist (like you said).

Why have they declined? Because free was _out-competed by paid options_.
Spotify/Netflix/iTunes etc is a better experience than free, where the value
of the experience is greater to the user than its cost.

If publishers want to come out of this alive, they have to start providing
more value than some dude running a server out of their basement could.

------
Chiba-City
Getting any technical books even for money before Borders and now Amazon
arrived was almost impossible. I used to go to DC's Library of Congress to get
papers on garbage collection. Publishers freaked out over Xerox machines
during the 80's. Financial windfall incentives were never good reasons to
study or design. Broke lesser universities mostly funnel noise into our pools
of research. Silly entertainment fictions and games are more valuable in
dollars. Information asymmetries on taxpayer subsidized research was both
unjust and leveraged for cascading abuses. Non-monetizable riches are the HIGH
CLASS problems our civilization needs. We can solve that "problem" forever.

------
msh317
Open Access will always win, the question is how to take content to the next
level. For example providing free open access to content is the product
Google, Yahoo, FaceBook offer. The real question is how to take content,
music, novels, academic papers, etc. into the value chain.

Artists will always produce inspiring things, they get paid however only when
that inspiration creates value, so the question is how to measure that value
and return to the creator of value. This seems simple enough – measure,
gather, settle, return. For example, our system of transportation paid for by
the community of interest – yet it returns value in the form of supporting a
supply chain. Indirect, but successful.

------
heisenbit
There are a lot of faulty, manipulated or statistically underpowered studies
out there. Some are doing real damage and the only way to stop it is to look
at the details and discredit them.

Worse there are people out there who specialize in selective quoting and
manipulating our understanding of science. Case in point "The plant paradox"
book telling everyone that egg yokes reduce cholesterol and citing a paper
which said the exact opposite:
[https://youtu.be/7NT4q_5dfLs?t=216](https://youtu.be/7NT4q_5dfLs?t=216)

People wielding science have a lot of power - without transparency there is no
accountability.

------
snthd
Can we not just have the law changed and buy them all out? Like ending
slavery.

------
beisner
I am very much in favor of open access, but there is one service that these
publishers could definitely provide that would definitely be a value-add:
replication. I can imagine a prestigious journal or publisher using the money
they've collected to sponsor studies that replicate results. I need to think
more on how this model could work such that piracy doesn't circumvent it, but
I think there is definitely a need for more replication studies and
prestigious publishers have an incentive to ensure that their studies are
replicable.

~~~
yyyyip
You are hopelessly naive if you think for profit publishers would ever do
that.

~~~
beisner
It's not necessarily a concept relegated to the publishers. Just a potential
revenue model for replication.

------
analognoise
Pay to read an article? No, but I'd pay to talk to somebody who understood it,
or who could answer questions about it. Is that a viable extra service that
the publishers could move into?

------
scottlegrand2
1\. Go to the library of a public university

2\. Download all the articles you want to a USB stick and print them at work.

3\. Profit!!!

Downvoted? I thought that this was relevant to the whole publisher issue
myself. They provide zero incremental value and serve as little more than
incremental friction towards accessing their content freely. Notice that step
2 was _not_ upload to scihub.

Peer review, the last thing that they did provide, seems to be undergoing
disruption by crowdsourced attempts at replicating results.

~~~
mkl
1\. You usually need to be a student or staff member to be able to do that.

2\. Few universities have access to all journals - it's too expensive.

~~~
scottlegrand2
Not at state university campuses. I do this all the time at UC campuses. In
fact I've been doing it for the better part of two decades since I left
academia. And if I wanted to pay $60 or so annually, I could even borrow
books.

Ironically, I've worked with academia and government labs on two major
projects and because I don't have an official academic email address, I can't
even get a researchgate account without paying.

------
posterboy
While the analogy to musical recording publishers does not fully compare to
the scientific publishing in question here, I'd like to point out the
similarity to start-up funding, venture capitalism et al: It's quite funny how
some will argue against music lables on a site like this. At least the vetting
and fostering part _should_ apply to scientific publishing, too.

------
dmitriid
> brought forth a roar of policies and mandates that aim to oblige authors to
> change their publishing habits

Right. Blame the authors. Not, say Elsevier, who _demands authors remove their
own research from their own sites_ and charges exorbitant prices for access to
journals.

> Now, some European countries are trying a new approach: to demand of the
> major publishers nationwide open access contracts, such as Projekt DEAL in
> Germany

Indeed. Because it's _not the authors who are to blame_.

\- In July 2015, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU)
announced a plan to start boycotting Elsevier, which refused to negotiate on
any Open Access policy for Dutch universities

\- In December 2016, Nature Publishing Group reported that academics in
Germany, Peru and Taiwan are to lose access to Elsevier journals as
negotiations had broken down with the publisher

etc etc. etc.

"What I find startling ... [that] 15 years on from the Budapest Open Access
Declaration, a pirate site is needed at all." asks the author of the article.
Why, indeed.

> Sci-Hub, which is self-reporting more than 60 million articles freely
> available (Sci-Hub, 2017) and could have harvested nearly all scholarly
> literature (Himmelstein, Romeo, McLaughlin, Greshake, & Greene, 2017) – if
> true, Sci-Hub has _single-handedly won the race to make all journal articles
> open access_.

So... WHY IS THIS A BAD THING?

> Set against this are the combined efforts of stakeholders in scholarly
> communications who, after two decades, have managed only to get around half
> the world's research articles open, with the rest still behind a paywall 3–4
> years post-publication

WHY ARE THEY SET AGAINST THIS?

> For books, despite initiatives like Open Access Publishing in European
> Networks (OAPEN), Knowledge Unlatched, and Open Book Publishers, progress
> has been glacial. At the time of writing, there are just over 8,000 titles
> listed in the Directory of Open Access Books
> ([http://www.doabooks.org/](http://www.doabooks.org/)), which – considering
> that Springer alone offers nearly 280,000 titles from its online bookshop –
> suggests that the proportion of books published open access has yet to reach
> 2%.

"What I find startling ... [that] 15 years on from the Budapest Open Access
Declaration, a pirate site is needed at all." asks the author of the article.

.... and then he goes on blame authors, and only authors.

> On the author side, peer review management, copyediting, and language
> services could be offered along with services to promote the publications
> and make them more accessible to non-technical audiences.

Peer review is already done mostly for free. Why does he _keep blaming the
authors_?

Surprisingly, after spending the entire article vilifying the authors, the
author of the article reaches this conclusion: " Critically, only one actor is
needed to start this process of unbundling: the publisher. In making a basic,
legal version free for anyone to read, gratis open access is achieved at a
stroke, and it would start to make the pirates redundant."

 _orly_?

~~~
tom_mellior
Excellent post. I'd add two things (quoting TFA, not you):

> copyediting

In my experience, that's a bad joke. The last paper I had edited by
professional Springer editors came out with more errors that I had put in. The
process achieved the exact opposite of what it was meant to achieve.

> when allowed, just 13% of authors posted green versions on their
> institutional repository, and allowed or not, just over half posted full-
> text versions on ResearchGate

Besides the factor mentioned in the article, that universities are bad at
communicating their services _to their own employees_ , there is also the fact
that these institutional repositories simply suck. They suck because they are
a large heap of "not-invented-here", they suck because they are bureaucratic
and usability nightmares. But even without all that, and even 20 years into
the age of Google, one centralized repository is easier to search and explore
than 1000 little ones.

Authors know this, which is why they prefer putting their work literally
anywhere else. This is not about aversion to change, it's about aversion to
bad systems.

------
HaoZeke
Does this really matter to people trying to publish and get recognition? I
know for a fact that professors, like any author are touched when people
discuss their work.

I've never heard of anyone first asking where they got the article from or if
they paid for it.. Research is hard enough without worrying about the bean
counters.

------
modeless
It's simple. Stop selling journals and host conferences instead. People are
still willing to pay for conferences even if the papers are published open
access. The gatekeeping role played by journals can be replaced by
conferences.

------
eecc
Love how these parasites appropriate words like "fairness" and define the
scope of all possible ethical options within the bounds of whatever business
model is profitable for them...

... bah

------
fsloth
Did anyone actually read to the end before unloading the acerbic comments?

This article is obviously targeted to the people involved in publishing who
care only about the profit model part and not of the science part. I presume
that's why it reads like a first year essay in some economic degree.

As an occasional consumer of research papers I see nothing wrong of the
conclusion in the end:

"I suggest that we might be encouraged by the airline industry and unbundle
the product. This would make all content free to read, answering the plea that
the results of publicly funded research be available to the public,"

------
Vinnl
The title here and many comments are based on a misunderstanding: the article
is not about _open access_ beating closed access, the article is about
_piracy_ beating proper open access.

The question is: we've spent so many years trying to make sure published
research free to access, trying different models [1] to make it happen, with
only very limited success. How come Sci-Hub is taking off so well, and what
can we do to free articles from paywalls legally?

[1] [https://medium.com/flockademic/how-open-can-open-access-
be-c...](https://medium.com/flockademic/how-open-can-open-access-be-
cf6662565ecd)

------
fnj
> We've failed: open access is winning and we must change our approach

"What do you mean, "we", white man?"

------
KKKKkkkk1
The job of the journals is in providing middle-man services for scientists.
Everyone loves to hate middle men, but sometimes you can't do without them.
The best way to trade equities is on a stock exchange. Similarly, the best way
to prove that you're a scientist of the caliber that publishes in Nature or
Science is to publish in Nature or Science.

~~~
lou1306
The people who accept/reject your paper are mostly volunteers [1], so that
service alone doesn't justify the prices.

And if you take a look around this thread, the other services really aren't
that much better.

[1] [https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/75147/do-
peer-r...](https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/75147/do-peer-
reviewers-receive-any-salary/75163#75163)

~~~
KKKKkkkk1
The people who sell or buy my shares of stock don't work for the stock
exchange either. That's what makes the exchange a middle man.

------
Aloha
One of my frustrations is that scientific papers decades old are still locked
behind a paywall - so while I might voluntarily donate something if I find the
content useful - I'm not for example willing to pay 40 dollars to find out if
an article that is 60 years old is interesting or useful - but I might pay 1-2
dollars after the fact. I totally get paywalling say.. anything newer than 5
years - I don't get the point of paywalling something 40-50-60 years old.

~~~
dnautics
You're not the target market. A person with a corporate credit card is willing
to pay that much to read it, in certain industries.

~~~
pishpash
Any sane bean counter should be able to work out a way to segment the market,
like every subscription service ever, but it would require distributor content
control, like DRM or streaming.

------
tombert
I definitely have issue with the fact that so many papers are behind Paywalls,
and I don't really have a problem with SciHub, since I think research should
be open, but don't most of the major professional organizations/communities
give you a Spotify-like access to papers?

I know my ACM membership, which is ~$200 a year has given me access to a ton
of compsci papers. Maybe ACM is the exception on this?

~~~
philipkglass
Journal access through society membership is like needing a subscription
service for every record label. I do a lot of reading about solar power
technologies. Relevant articles are published in journals of the IEEE, ACS,
IOP, RSC, OSA, APS, AIP... and a bunch of non-society journals too.

------
unixhero
Fuck yeah. This is fantastic.

------
Frogolocalypse
I'm not sure many people who have commented on this article actually read the
entire thing through. I think it was a very insightful article on the
vertically integrated business of scientific study that was the issue, and the
suggestions as they relate to the airline industry as something that I hadn't
seen spelled out in such a detailed manner before.

------
Froyoh
Cody Doctorow's Information Doesn't Want to Be Free is a good read about this.

[https://archive.org/details/InformationDoesntWantToBeFree](https://archive.org/details/InformationDoesntWantToBeFree)

------
fgjjgutjvnu
The comparison to the music industry omits that other than music, science
tends to be funded by governments.

