
Should All Research Papers Be Free? - mirimir
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/opinion/sunday/should-all-research-papers-be-free.html
======
kriro
If it is funded by government in any way (public university, research project)
I think it is borderline defrauding the tax payer that the research funded by
tax-money is not free by default. Since close to all research is government
funded in some way, shape or form...my answer would be yes in the general
case.

I think the long term answer is decentralized publishing. Publish everything
you do on a university or private website and let others decide if it's good
or not when they want to cite it instead of a peer review that is set in
stone. I think people reading papers deciding if they want to cite you are
smart enough to figure out if it's good research or not. The peer review
process is overrated (and quite often suffers from insider networks). If you
decentralize publishing you can also have other researchers upvote a paper to
basically approve of the academic standards in the paper. I also think the
static nature of papers is a problem. I'd much rather cite a specific version
of the paper. I'm thinking about git and pull requests along the lines of
"want to cite, fixed layout" or "new research disproves this" etc.

~~~
mattlutze
I don't have a ton of time to search each university's publication database or
every 2nd tier research team's private home-grown web site.

Journals provide a filtering intermediary that helps me better use my time.
Hopefully I can figure out which editorial teams are going to publish good vs
ok vs crap research and pick from those, relying on the curative capabilities
of their staff to provide interesting and useful reading.

Journals should still want to publish great research, and publicly funded
research should still be available to the public. Maybe there's indeed a more
relaxed middle-ground to "just put it all out there and hope folks find and
share it." We all agree the journal industry needs some help, but I don't
think society is well-served by completely decimating its economic model.

~~~
amelius
> I don't have a ton of time to search each university's publication database
> or every 2nd tier research team's private home-grown web site. Journals
> provide a filtering intermediary that helps me better use my time.

I don't have time to scavenge through all the tech news every day, but that's
partly why I visit HN. Also, I use Google when I'm looking for some specific
topic.

In other words, filtering can be done perfectly well by communities and third-
party organizations.

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
One difference between HN and, say, math is that in this community most
readers are probably interested in at least a sizable minority of the topics
that get posted here, whereas in a hypothetical community of mathematicians
discussing papers, I find it hard to believe that most people will be
interested in more than about 1% of the literature.

~~~
slang800
Then you just use more specialized content aggregators or more specific
searches. To make an analogy to reddit - rather than following r/math, you'd
follow a specific topic like r/compling.

------
robertwalsh0
Full disclosure: I'm a founder of a company called Scholastica that provides
software that helps journals peer-review and publish open-access content
online. One of our journal clients, Discrete Analysis, is linked to in the NYT
article.

It is incredibly obvious that journal content shouldn't cost as much as it
does.

\- Scholars write the content for free

\- Scholars do the peer-review for free

\- All the legacy publishers do is take the content and paywall PDF files

Can you believe it? Paywalling. PDFs. For billions.

Of course the publishers say they create immense value by typesetting said
PDFs, but as technologists, we can clearly see that this is bunk.

There's a comment in this thread that mentions the manual work involved in
taking Word files and getting them into PDFs, XML, etc. While that is an
issue, which you could consider a technology problem, it definitely doesn't
justify the incredible cost of journal content that has been created and peer-
reviewed at no cost. Keep in mind that journal prices have risen much faster
than the consumer price index since the 80s (1).

The future is very clear, academics do the work as they've always done and
share the content with the public at a very low cost via the internet.

PS. If you want a peek into how the publishers see the whole Sci-Hub
kerfuffle, check out this post from one of their industry blogs - the comment
section is a doozy: [http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2016/03/02/sci-hub-
and-th...](http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2016/03/02/sci-hub-and-the-four-
horsemen-of-the-internet/)

1\. [https://cdn1.vox-
cdn.com/thumbor/jtj2dzMfklULQipRZt_3xaLoFxU...](https://cdn1.vox-
cdn.com/thumbor/jtj2dzMfklULQipRZt_3xaLoFxU=/800x0/filters:no_upscale\(\)/cdn0.vox-
cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/6143539/fig-increases.0.png)

~~~
dinkumthinkum
Why are you under the impression scholars write the papers for free? That is
what researchers are employed at universities to do ... Yes, it is not like
publishing a book but these papers are not really like books anyway.

~~~
Retra
They're not getting paid by the publisher.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
No we don't get paid by the publisher but we are paid to write papers. I can
be downvoted for being correct but it doesn't change anything. Researchers are
paid by research institution to do research for which product are papers.

~~~
alanh
You’re being downvoted because this technicality / POV has no real bearing on
the main question and doesn’t add to the discussion.

------
payne92
I feel especially strongly that papers that result from taxpayer-funded
research should be free.

~~~
ikeboy
Are you, as a taxpayer, willing to pay (your share of) the extra $1000 or so
per paper that it would take?

~~~
4bpp
In CS, conferences (which organise peer review and pretty much all publish
open-access proceedings) hardly ever charge more than something like $200 for
attendance, and this also pays for the conference venue, logistics and a slush
fund of financial support for student attendees. Why would the peer review and
publication part cost more in other fields?

It seems much more likely that PLOS simply charges the "$1000 or so" because
they can, and it's easy enough to piggyback on the traditional publisher
narrative that they are actually providing this amount of added value.

~~~
capnrefsmmat
PLOS is a non-profit, and employs full-time professional editors.

People forget the weird workflow in any journal that does biomedical work
(including most of the PLOS family): manuscripts are submitted as Word files,
then converted to XML and reformatted by a semi-automated process. There's
manual labor involved to format the references and cross-references, mark up
tables and figures, and proofread the HTML, PDF, and XML versions. The XML is
then submitted to PubMed Central for archival storage.

There's a lot of manual labor involved in the profess. You can't just hand-
wave away and say "peer review is provided for free" and assume the rest of
the process is free.

~~~
return0
For all that matters , a badly formatted "times 12" word document is just as
fine as a "polished" research article. This is science we are talking about,
it's not an infomercial. Besides, all journals have strict and long guidelines
that all presumbissions follow. I just don't buy the manual labor argument.

~~~
Fomite
I've read enough journal articles that I've come to appreciate proper
formatting, rather than "Time New Roman 12" Word documents or "Generic LaTeX
Template #17"

~~~
brohee
DJB got a quite different view on journal provided LaTeX styles :
[https://cr.yp.to/writing/visual.html](https://cr.yp.to/writing/visual.html)

Nice value added by the MSRI style right here.

------
reuven
When I finished my PhD at Northwestern, part of the university's procedure
involved going to the ProQuest Web site. ProQuest is a journal and
dissertation publishing company.

They asked if I wanted my dissertation to be available, free of charge, to
anyone interested in reading it.

Clicking on "yes, I want to make it available for free" would cost me
something like $800.

Clicking on "no, I'll let you charge people to see it" would cost me nothing.

Having just finished, and being in debt to do so, it shouldn't come as a
surprise that I wasn't rushing to pay even more. So now, if people want to see
my dissertation, they have to pay -- or be part of an institution that pays an
annual fee to ProQuest. (BTW, e-mail me if you want a copy.)

My guess is that it's similar with other journals. And while professors have
more than PhD students, they have limited enough research funds that they'll
hold their nose, save the money, and keep things behind a paywall.

Which is totally outrageous. It's about time that this change, and I'm happy
to see what looks like the beginning of the end on this front.

~~~
jmvalin
There is an alternative: you host your thesis (and/or papers) on your own
website, or you put them on arXiv.org. It's called self-archiving and it's
allowed by most publishers. Funny thing is: making your papers available for
free also increases the number of citations, something academics really care
about.

~~~
juliendorra
And another alternative at some universities is the university thesis open
archive itself. In Northern Europe I'm told some universities won't even give
you your diploma if you don't upload your thesis in their open archive.

Frankly, every university in the world should have an open archive for thesis
(and mutualized is even better). It's just the continuation of keeping thesis
copies at the university library.

------
imglorp
Some things, like dissemination of knowledge, are truly in the interest of all
humanity. It seems criminal that a few hundred people at the publishing houses
should benefit at the expense of billions' welfare.

~~~
KKKKkkkk1
While it is the scientists who are writing the papers and editing them, the
journals provide a valuable service as intermediaries between the scientists.
Whether this service is best provided "for free" or for profit is another
question. In some fields, the leading journals are already published by not-
for-profit organizations such as the ACM, but I am not sure that they are
doing a better job than Springer or Elsevier.

In a language that's understandable to the HN crowd, journals:scientists are
as VCs:(founders + investors).

~~~
mirimir
Does ACM sell individual papers? If so, what's the price?

~~~
jordigh
It's about the same as everyone else: about 15 USD per paper, e.g.

[https://dl.acm.org/purchase.cfm?id=2756548&CFID=761526954&CF...](https://dl.acm.org/purchase.cfm?id=2756548&CFID=761526954&CFTOKEN=47826433)

They also have a somewhat restrictive licensing on their software:

[http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/softwarecrnotice](http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/softwarecrnotice)

This part is kind of weird, as they have a noncommercial clause on their
copyrighted algorithms, which makes them non-free.

On a slightly different note, I was somewhat saddened by how the International
Lisp Conference talks were recorded but unavailable because the ACM will not
allow their publication.

~~~
mirimir
How the hell can that be "non-profit"? Where is the money going? Free
conferences in Dubai?

~~~
russell_h
The ACM publishes annual reports with a high level breakdown of their
finances. The most recent one is here:

[https://www.acm.org/binaries/content/assets/about/annual-
rep...](https://www.acm.org/binaries/content/assets/about/annual-reports-
current-fy/acmfy15.pdf)

The finances are on pages 12 and 13. The short version: they're spending money
on all the things you'd expect, but they seem to be slightly cash flow
positive and have accrued around $100m in net assets.

~~~
mirimir
What I'm wondering about is the economic justification for charging $15 per
article copy. Other than "we can", I mean.

~~~
ska
The usual "economic justification" for such things is that people are paying
it.

In reality, very few people pay the individual article prices. The real market
is in site licensing, as it were. The individual article prices are probably
set to support the sales story on these institutional access licenses, not the
other way around.

~~~
russell_h
I think you can also get access to the ACM library via membership. When I was
in college I paid for a student membership, I think its was $25/year or
something generally reasonable. Probably a better value proposition than my
actual CS degree, not that its a great point for comparison.

~~~
ska
That's true. Many of these sorts of memberships are at least a few hundred
dollars when you are no longer a student, so they add up pretty quickly (but
maybe have tax credits).

------
stegosaurus
All everything 'should' be free. At least, that which is not scarce.

The correct question to ask is 'can' all research papers be free - does the
world continue to spin, will research still happen, will we still progress, if
they are free?

The only reason we even have this debate to begin with is because the
producers of this information require scarce/controlled resources in order to
survive.

~~~
savanaly
It's not exactly post-scarcity, it's just zero marginal cost. It's true that,
given the product has already been created and has zero marginal cost, it
"should" be free. But for setting the expectations that producers of future
products have about what compensation they'll receive we can't simply say it
should be free.

~~~
zanny
The marginal units absolutely can be free, just pay for the research itself.
Fixed cost for fixed work.

~~~
ycmbntrthrwaway
That is how private research is funded, say at Microsoft Research. You agree
on "deliverables" and get your money for each stage of your work. Deliverables
include tech reports, source code, prototypes and things like that. You get
nothing after your stop working on the project. For producers, i.e.
researchers, this scheme is not worse than grants and getting money for
published articles, citations etc., they don't get money for years after the
publication anyway.

------
davnn
I think Elbakyan should do everything to make sci-hub easily replaceable. Once
it's hosted on multiple places it would be much harder to shut down.

Maybe completely free research papers are not the future but there should be a
Spotify for research papers that is affordable for everyone. I hope that
Elbakyan will reach her goal and ultimately change the whole industry.

------
platform
Taxpayer funded research must be free to read.

Also, a research that has been at least partially tax-funded resulting in a
publication, must not be usable as an necessary ingredient for a commercial
patent.

That is, a patent can include this type of research, but it cannot be a
'necessity' for the patent to be viable. Or, if the particular research, is
necessary for a given patent to be viable, the patent must grant no-fees, no-
commercial-strings-attached use.

This allows a corporation to establish patents as means to protect itself,
while allowing the tax funded research to be used by others without commercial
strings attached

------
jammycakes
Something I'd like to see here: results published in research papers
aggregated and released as open data.

There must be a lot of interesting meta-analyses that aren't getting done
because the necessary data is locked away behind paywalls, and usually not in
an easily machine readable format into the bargain.

------
denzil_correa
> “The real people to blame are the leaders of the scientific community —
> Nobel scientists, heads of institutions, the presidents of universities —
> who are in a position to change things but have never faced up to this
> problem in part because they are beneficiaries of the system,” said Dr.
> Eisen. “University presidents love to tout how important their scientists
> are because they publish in these journals.”

For me, this is the cog of the problem. People who are in a position to change
should push for it.

------
tomahunt
There must be thousands of people who could use free access to research
papers: PhDs and Masters now in industry trying to apply the state of the art,
engineers who have worked their way into a subject, concerned citizens who
want to read the source material.

I am a PhD who'd love to be working in industry, but I'm shit scared that once
I leave the gates of the university I'll simply lose touch with the state of
the art because the papers will no longer be accessible.

~~~
alphonsegaston
Many university library systems have programs where alumni (and sometimes
outsiders) can purchase access to their resources for a yearly fee. If that's
unavailable to you or cost prohibitive, most academic libraries are open to
the public. When I worked at an engineering library for a large university, a
good part of my day was spent helping working professional access these kinds
of resources.

------
bloaf
Yes. They should.

It is in the best interests of _humanity_ to make the knowledge obtained
through research available to anyone looking for that knowledge. There is a
clear consensus among scientists that the current publishing model is at best
inexpedient and at worst hostile to that end.

Most people are asking what good the current publishing model provides, but I
think to answer that question we need to ask: "compared to what?" It seems
clear to me that the current model is better than having no publishing
mechanism at all, but I doubt that anyone seriously thinks that the "none"
model is the only alternative.

I think that if we sat down today and thought up a new publishing model from
scratch, we would be able to outdo the status quo on just about every "good"
people have mentioned here, as well as provide features that the current model
is incapable of. I think it is highly likely that we could make a system that
ran on donated resources alone.

Some things we might want/have in a "from scratch" model:

1\. Direct access to data-as-in-a-database instead of data-as-a-graph-in-a-PDF

2\. Blockchain-based reputation system for scientists

3\. P2P storage and sharing of scientific data

4\. Tiers of scientific information, e.g. an informal forum-of-science, semi-
formal wiki-of-science, and formal publications

5\. Automated peer review process

6\. A better and more consistent authoring tool for scientists

------
ycmbntrthrwaway
The main problems with tax-funded research and grants is that money is given
in return for citations in journals with high "impact factor". As a result,
publishers of those journals are indirectly supported by the state. Instead,
government or funding organizations should review the results of the work for
themselves, but they are unable to do it, because they usually don't
understand a thing about research subject.

~~~
return0
That's the problem, organizations don't _want_ do do the work so they
outsource it. But the journal market is not free, it's dominated by incumbents
who earned the position centuries ago. As the experience with open access
journals shows so far, it's near impossible to get scientists to volunteer
their free labor to a new journal. Regulatory action (like requiring open
access for all govt-funded science) should be taken here.

~~~
drjesusphd
But the publishers outsource _the same work_ to referees. Why not cut out the
middle man and have the funding agencies orchestrate the peer-review? That's
what they do for grants anyway.

------
arbre
Can someone explain me why the researchers themselves don't publish their work
for free? The article says they are not paid for the articles so I don't see
why they couldn't do that.

~~~
a_bonobo
For the $1000-3000 that a single OA application costs I can pay for a new
computer, or send one or two students to conferences, or pay for part of a
stipend, finance a temporary web design guy, etc. Now I try to publish 10
papers per year - that's $10-30,000 out of the window for no "return" to our
group. For $30,000 I can send everyone to several conferences!

Conferences are more important to a scientific career than an OA paper. The
people who hire you will in all likelihood have access to your paper even if
it's behind a paywall.

~~~
DaveWalk
> Conferences are more important to a scientific career than an OA paper

Depends on you field of research, maybe? Paper publications make or break
early biomedical research careers.

Further, the grants that these funds are paid out of often have travel funds
built-in, so conferences are still available.

~~~
a_bonobo
>Paper publications make or break early biomedical research careers.

Yes, but that has nothing to do with the OA-status of those publications - if
it's a high-impact journal, then it makes the career, if it's not, then not.

------
cft
Publishing used to cost money when it required physical
printing/distrubution/storage of journals. Now all of this is basically free,
but they still charge. Most theoretical physicists for example only care about
"publishing" in the ArXiv (all free, open source). The traditional publishing
is ridiculous.

~~~
iabacu
Publishing cost today is smaller -- yet publishers actually charge more.

Libraries used to get a physical copy of the papers, which would grant
lifetime access to the research.

Today, they pay for subscription, and as soon as they stop paying, they lose
access to everything.

------
return0
I hope this publicitly doesnt lead to swift shutdown of scihub. She provides
us with a great service that helps many researchers work faster. We should
also commend her for stirring the most lively debate about an anachronistic
and dumb publishing system.

------
mrdrozdov
This isn't the right question. The question is, "Who should be profiting from
research papers?" The Journal performs quality control for the sake of
consistency and prestige, but the papers and their reviews are put together by
researchers, commonly at great cost for marginal personal gain. The article's
hero doesn't really care. She needs to read papers, and needs other people to
be able to read them, so she built sci-hub (demo: [https://sci-
hub.io/10.1038/nature16990](https://sci-hub.io/10.1038/nature16990)).

~~~
platform
WRT > This isn't the right question. The question is, "Who should be profiting
from research papers?"

I am not sure that the way you put it s right either.

Because "who should be profiting from research papers?" is too generic of a
question, and does not appear to necessarily supersede the question 'should
tax-funded publication be readable for free?'

If I may rephrase your question to be: "Quality control of a research paper,
must be, necessarily funded (either by money or a form of barter). Therefore
question a) who should fund it, question b) who should receive funding to do
the quality control"

Then, obviously, this is an important question. And I do not believe has been
clearly answered either in polices or on this forum.

My answer to ( a ) would be -- the same entity that funds the research
(therefore in this case the tax payers)

My answer to ( b ) would be -- a licensed or otherwise professionally
certified group, independently selected (that is not selected by the
researcher that authors the publication).

------
catnaroek
What follows is just my very uninformed opinion. I'm not a scientist myself,
but my interest in CS and math has made me an avid reader of scientific papers
and books - whenever they're publicly available, that is.

What publishing houses do is exploit the rules of the social games that
scientists themselves willingly play. When the importance of an academic work
is judged by the names of its authors, or by the name of the journal in which
it is published, or by the presence of fashionable keywords in its title or in
the abstract, scientists are giving publishing houses the very rope with which
they will be hanged. So, while the behavior of publishing houses is certainly
antisocial and most abominable, it is only made possible by the very
scientific community that condemns it.

Is there any fundamental reason why scientists can't always submit their
papers to the arXiv, and let the web of citations determine their relative
importance?

~~~
Al-Khwarizmi
In my country, for example, most applications for tenure, salary complements,
required assessments, etc., have an assessment scale like this (simplified but
this is basically the idea):

Paper in the 1st quartile of the ISI JCR journal list - 3 points

Paper in the 2nd quartile of the ISI JCR journal list - 2 points

Paper in the 3rd quartile of the ISI JCR journal list - 1 points

Rest - 0 points

So if you publish a ground-breaking paper in arXiv that everyone reads and
everyone cites, you get exactly zero points.

Of course, stuff like length of the paper, number of authors, possible overlap
with other published papers, or just actual quality (as in someone reading the
paper to see whether it's any good) also count zero. And then you have the
roulette factor of submitting a paper to a first-quartile journal in year X,
which gets published in year X+1 (due to the length of the publication
process), only to see that in year X+1 the journal is now fourth-quartile as
in CS they are dancing all the time...

~~~
catnaroek
What you described is exactly what I mean by “the social games scientists
themselves willingly play”. I'm not saying that any individual scientist has
the power to fix this, but it's undeniable that it's a problem - it empowers
publishing houses that profit from restricting access to science!

------
sekou
Providing more open access to existing research information is just as
important as empowering people to share and distribute the findings of their
research in formats that both machines and people can understand. I believe we
have already produced large amounts of data in wildly different fields of
study that can potentially be used with the help of machines (and the diverse
perspectives of many humans) to solve problems for which we currently don't
have answers.

It looks like the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) bill
linked in the article would be a step in the right direction for US citizens.
I wonder how other forces (like Sci-Hub) will affect the direction of things
to come.

------
justncase80
I was thinking a good startup company may be an open publication and peer
review site. Something where users are non-anonymous and they are weighted by
their accomplishments irl. Submissions and peer reviews would be open to
anyone but weighted heavily by ranking, which is affected by irl achievements
and cumulative quality contributions to the site. Like a combination of stack
overflow and wikipedia maybe.

Money would be made by donation (ala wikipedia) and paper submission fees.
Perhaps organizational level membership fees, such as universities, etc.

Just an idea I haven't had time to work on.

------
yeukhon
I am still willing to pay for a high-quality printed version of research
journals, but for the online access I think we should simply give away because
research knowledge should belong in the public domain when you choose to
publish the knowledge with a research journal. You are not publishing a paper
within your 4x4 walled intrnaet.

But I get it. There is a business cost behind running a journal / magazine
(although not all reputable one charge fees!). So here is the radical
question: why the fuck do we need 100+ CS-related journal publishers out
there? All we need is one.

~~~
ycmbntrthrwaway
> So here is the radical question: why the fuck do we need 100+ CS-related
> journal publishers out there? All we need is one.

I don't get it. You want it to be monopoly?

~~~
jacquesm
It need not be a monopoly even if there is only one. It could be a
decentralized single entity along the lines of usenet with a whole pile of
people contributing and there being only one major distribution network.

------
alkonaut
Let's rephrase the question: should public research funded with public money
have results available to those who paid for it?

This isn't Elseviers fault, or the researchers fault or the universities
fault, it's the fault of whoever distributes public money to research without
having proper criteria for what is expected in return.

------
naveen99
I plan to submit my next paper to peerj
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerJ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerJ)

------
tn13
All the state funded research must be in public domain. Everywhere else the
one who funds the research must decide what to do with it.

------
erikpukinskis
A better question to me is "Should there be fields where distributing your
work for free will harm your academic career?"

------
ajuc
Science funded by taxes should be free, obviously.

------
n2dasun
I found it chuckleworthy that this posted on the NYT site, which is known for
paywalled articles.

------
guico
I wonder, in the end what's really holding open-access publishing back? What
can we do, as technologists, to help fix it?

------
jeffdavis
Nothing is "free", the only question is: "who pays, and how does that change
the incentives and results?".

~~~
js8
Of course there are things that are "free", such as scientific progress and
artworks made by already dead people, or sun radiation. Making everything
"non-free" will lead to self-contradictory theories such as labor theory of
value.

------
pmarreck
How is something that is, in essence, "truth determination and dissemination,"
not free?

------
dschiptsov
At least they will get wider and less biased and institution-conditioned
reviews.

------
leed25d
Research funded by taxpayer dollars should be free to those who paid for it.

------
jimjimjim
unpopular opinion ahead: no, and probably not even for taxpayer funded
research.

Can you demand a lift in a garbage truck? or in a tank? both of these things
are provided for local or central government. why not? because it distracts
from the job that they are there for. The same can be said for research (and
source code). It takes time, effort and money to publish and peer review
research. If journals can't make money providing access to the research who is
going to pay for it?

Also there is currently a lot of BAD research out there. Domain experts don't
have time to review all of it. Journals with prestigious names act as filters
and as sort of priority queues for where you should look first.

~~~
jacobolus
Just to clarify: Is your position that research written by academic
scientists, funded by government grants and university budgets, reviewed by
volunteers, and proofread and typeset by the researchers themselves, handed
off to a journal to put in a print edition or stick a pdf on their website,
should belong exclusively to the corporate owners of the journal for a period
of ~100 years after publication, with no profit flowing back to the
university, the researcher, or the reviewers?

If this is not your position, can you clarify what you think scientific
publishing should look like?

> _because it distracts from the job that they are there for._

What is the “job scientific papers are there for”, if not sharing knowledge
with other scientists and the people of the world?

As for your silly garbage truck / tank analogy: instead of these, we have
buses, which work much better for the task.

~~~
adrianbd
This.

Journals made a lot of sense before the age of the internet, when they
actually did have to do a lot of work to coordinate the activity of physically
collecting research papers, mailing them for reviews, paying dedicated people
for typesetting and so on. Although the cost of all of this has almost
vanished now that tools for editing are so accessible and delivery costs are
inexistent, publishers still charge ridiculous sums for papers produced mostly
from public money simply because of their prestige.

------
baby
You don't want me to read your paper? Charge for it.

------
sandra_saltlake
required open access publication

------
adultSwim
Yes

------
kombucha2
Yes

------
Chinjut
Yes.

("Betteridge's law of headlines" fails)

~~~
nether
Not much of a law when it's broken so often.

------
x5n1
What benefit do the publishers provide to anyone? Why do the publishers
deserve billions of dollars?

~~~
zmmmmm
Someone has to coordinate the peer review process - that is, vet the trash,
enforce standards, locate qualified reviewers and coordinate their feedback
into digestible form. Now, in my opinion 95% of this is automatable and the
other 5% probably costs about $50 per manuscript, so the current fees are
certainly outrageous. However I don't think we will be doing ourselves a
service to say that publishers do nothing at all. They just don't do anything
comparable the value that they extract.

------
lacker
Why does it cost $3000 to publish an article?? You can put it on Medium for
free.

------
arek_
Who will produce meaningful research for free?

~~~
rfrey
The people who conduct the research, and the people who fund the research, are
not collecting the fees to view the research.

~~~
ikeboy
The open access journals charge thousands. Journal publishing has costs, and
they need to be born by someone. If not from access fees, they'll need to be
paid upfront, which means each study costs more, which means either less
studying gets done, or funds come from elsewhere to fund it.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
>Journal publishing has costs

I've yet to see any justification at all for the outrageous fees charged by
academic journals.

The only costs I can see are printing/distribution and web hosting.

Typesetting is trivial. Editing is non-existent. Editorial isn't paid. Peer
review isn't paid.

Having a nice office and marketing staff who hold university libraries to
ransom shouldn't count as a cost.

~~~
ikeboy
The first fact you need to deal with is that open access journals, started to
explicitly counter the cost problem, have similar costs. If it was as simple
as you think it is, open access journals would be much cheaper. (Arxiv is not
peer reviewed, and does not count.)

The second point is that publishers costs are around 70% of revenue, as the
article says margins are around 30%. That means there's a limit to how low
they can go and not lose money, and I doubt many of those complaining would
suddenly stop if prices were 30% lower.

~~~
denzil_correa
> (Arxiv is not peer reviewed, and does not count.

Oh it does count. Peer reviews in journals are done by scientists for free.
Peer review adds completely negligible costs (or even ZERO) to a journal.
ArXiv is the perfect example.

~~~
ikeboy
> Peer review adds completely negligible costs (or even ZERO) to a journal.

Then can you explain why arxiv costs around $10 per paper, while plos charges
over 100 times as much?

~~~
denzil_correa
I don't know why PLOS charges more. The point I'm trying to make is that -
just because there's an OA journal out there which charges $100 per article;
it doesn't mean that the costs are justified.

~~~
ikeboy
Do you have any compelling evidence that the costs for OA journals is one or
two orders of magnitude less than everyone claims they are? (See e.g.
[http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-
scie...](http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-
publishing-1.12676) which also shows a wide variety in publishing costs.)

------
julie1
Should leibniz, keppler, Einstein, newton, flemming, jenner papers should have
been free?

Oh they were. And it is thanks to flemming that people stopped dying in
atrocious ways over the world from gangrene.

Should citizens be able to access state of the art research about how to
prevent vascular disease, dietetic, chemical pollution, effects of fracking,
urbanisms to help them make good choices when voting? I do think so.

Because no vote exists without enlighten choices.

Chosing without relevant information on future choice that will impact every
one require citizens that can have a constructed opinion. And experts are
doing a poor job at being right. (look at the financial regulations made by
experts and the long lasting crisis since 2000).

So yes, papers should be free to support the exercise of democracy.

------
ikeboy
>The largest companies, like Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Springer and Wiley,
typically have profit margins of over 30 percent, which they say is justified
because they are curators of research, selecting only the most worthy papers
for publication.

> But that financial model requires authors to pay a processing charge that
> can run anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 per article so the publisher can
> recoup its costs.

These two facts seem to point strongly to the publishers' being in the right.
30% is not a high number. If they were to lower their prices by 30%, running
completely as nonprofits (or whatever number would break even), do you think
people's complaints about difficulty of access would go away? If not, your
complaining is _not_ about their profit.

And you can't seriously expect them to eat a >$1000 loss on every paper.

Either we need a single party to fund upfront, like the government, or we need
some other way to pay for it.

~~~
ikeboy
The quote from the The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (not the UN
charter [http://www.un.org/en/charter-united-
nations/](http://www.un.org/en/charter-united-nations/), odd mistake by the
nytimes) is also misleading.

The very next sentence says

>(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material
interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of
which he is the author.

~~~
Blahah
Note that the authors do not get materials benefit when journals sell their
articles. If anything that sentence means that authors can claim back the
profits made by publishers.

~~~
ikeboy
Authors sign over their copyrights to the journals. Are you suggesting
copyright should not be transferable (people should not be permitted to
transact freely)?

Authors do benefit by being able to publish for much less than it would cost
were they to bear all the costs. To be precise, they benefit by the cost of
open access that offers comparable service.

