
What Is a Sustainable Path to Open Access? - lelf
https://blog.sigplan.org/2020/01/14/what-is-a-sustainable-path-to-open-access/
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sigwinch28
"Cows make milk. They milk themselves. Other cows check the milk (for free).
Cows - get this - PAY THE FARMER to take the milk away. Then the farmer (you
won't believe this, honestly) sells the milk _back to the cows_. Sometimes the
farmer lets the cow drink a tiny bit of its own milk. The farmer calls it
'longstanding commitment to Open Access'."

[https://www.ned-potter.com/blog/how-to-explain-academic-
publ...](https://www.ned-potter.com/blog/how-to-explain-academic-publishing-
to-a-five-year-old)

I have a rough upper bound on the costs of collecting, hosting, distributing,
archiving, and indexing academic papers across the world: arXiv.

The publishers provide no real value to the publishing process except their
prestigious conference and/or journal names and the conference events
themselves. The latter should be decoupled from the publishing process (and
they charge through the nose for conference attendance, anyway).

~~~
vaylian
Yes. All of this is based on a completely outdated publishing model. Because
back in the day, publishing scientific results in a distributable medium
actually required a dedicated industry (typesetting, printing, distributing).
Nowadays this has become completely obsolete thanks to the internet and
digital documents.

Reputation of journals exists only so that cheap metrics can be calculated.
This way the funding bodies do not actually have to read the papers, but can
simply judge them by a summary statistic. But plenty of times it is only a
crude approximation of the value of scientific work.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> publishing scientific results actually required a dedicated industry
> (typesetting, printing, distributing)

I’d say that many scholars still want that dedicated industry. Everyone
appreciates having a proofreader and editor who is trained in the subject, but
now working full-time professionally in editing services, so that this burden
doesn’t fall on actual scholars who are already overworked. And in many fields
high-quality typesetting is still appreciated (and a quick visual way to
distinguish reputable publications from less reputable ones).

The complaint is that mercenary publishers like Springer and Elsevier aren’t
even providing that industry any more. They no longer provide proofreading,
cutglass typesetting, and all the other benefits which, once upon a time, they
used to convince learned societies to hand the running of the journals over to
them. Instead, the big publishers put all the grunt work onto the scholarly
community and they simply expect authors to simply provide a camera-ready .doc
or PDF for publication. These for-profit publishers simply collect charges
without providing any value.

~~~
musicale
> they simply expect authors to simply provide a camera-ready .doc or PDF for
> publication.

^This: the research, writing and editorial work is provided to the academic
publisher at no cost. The publisher prints paper copies which they sell at
outrageous markup, and usually hosts the PDFs behind an obnoxious paywall
(again with outrageous markup over the hosting, indexing, and distribution
costs.)

> These for-profit publishers simply collect charges without providing any
> value.

For-profit academic publishers often provide negative value by making
publications harder to access by polluting search results with links to their
paywalls vs. links to author sites and free digital libraries like arXiv or
sci-hub, and doing their best to shut down the latter.

This is harmful to authors and readers alike.

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olodus
If it is the hosting cost that is the factor here then aren't there quite good
distributed options (Bittorrent, Dat, IPFS) out here nowadays that would
simply leave hosting up to who ever wanted to store the paper. Then all you
need is a frontend for the hosting. Arxiv or whatever could serve that nicely.
After that you can include these in whatever journal you want.

Sorry maybe I am missing something. I've never really felt like I understand
scientific publishing, neither the traditional journal model or the Arxiv
model.

------
musicale
> the calculations of the “cost” that is proposed to mutualise seem to include
> much more than the publication process alone

This is the basic problem. Publication charges should pay for publication and
no more; they should not be a slush fund for the rest of ACM.

------
musicale
I am extremely disappointed that ACM opposes open access for federally funded
research.

Sorry, ACM - taxpayers paid for the research, and the authors and editors
provided the camera-ready copy to you at no cost.

