
Ask HN: Why are some research papers paywalled? - znpy
Isn&#x27;t the objective of science to spread new findings?<p>So why are some research papers published behind a paywall ?
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coreyp_1
The short answer is because it is a way for someone to make money.

Not trying to be trite, but it is the same rationale that is used to pay ICANN
for domain name registration or GoDaddy for an SSL certificate: They are
perceived as an authority (ICANN exclusively, GoDaddy as one of an elite few).

It's possible that arxiv.org would be the eqivalent of Let's Encrypt, both
lack the "extended verification" of the paid service.

For reputable journals, the peer review process is far from trivial. This last
year, I reviewed ~8 computer science papers. I only recommended 2 for
publication. For all of them, however, I spent several hours going through the
paper, the references, the algorithms, mathematics, experiments and
methodology, etc. For all of them I gave a detailed writeup to support my
recommendation. For all of them, there were 3-5 people doing the same. We are
all experts in the field.

Most submissions are rejected, but the review process is the same. The authors
(who worked several months on the paper) will probably take a failed
submission and rewrite parts of it, taking the suggestions and criticisms into
account, and re-submit it elsewhere, where the same effort is repeated by
different reviewers.

All of this is to say that there is a lot of overhead to get a paper
published.

Some journals charge a publication fee if your paper is accepted. If the
journal is an open-access journal (which is what you are looking for), then
the fee can be $2,000-$3,000!

Please note that I did not get paid a single cent to serve as reviewer for any
of the papers. The money goes somewhere, but not to me, and not to the
authors. Finally, being in CS and having a background in server management, I
can honestly say that the technology side is not that expensive, either, so
that is not a valid justification.

It should give everyone pause: Why does a conference cost $1,200 to attend
(not including the hotel stay or transportation) when the research presenters
don't get paid anything? Why does it cost such exorbitant fees to publish a
paper? Why does it cost so much to buy access to a single paper? The authors
and reviewers don't get paid any of the money.

Somebody _is_ making money on it, though.

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CyberFonic
Research is largely conducted in two areas:

1\. In academic institutions where grants are the core source of funding. In
order to get funding (and extensions of it) you need to have publications (the
more the better) in "high impact" journals. Over the years these journals have
become the property of big publishing companies - hence the profit motive and
the paywalls.

2\. In industry labs, research findings are a source of competitive advantage
and thus carefully guarded to maximise profit and to obstruct potential
competitors. Patent protection is typically sought out as soon as any results
from research are patentable.

In principle scientists share their findings, but the organisations that they
work within are motivated by the usual business imperatives. Once you are
employed in academia, you have good access to the paywalled material.

Depending upon your field of interest there may be some open access resources
available. Furthermore, if you directly contact authors and ask nicely, they
might send you copies of their work on a P2P basis.

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GFK_of_xmaspast
Because the objective of scientists is to get tenure, grants, and publish in
top journals.

