
Europe’s open-access drive escalates as university stand-offs spread - edwinksl
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05191-0
======
dwheeler
There is a relatively simple alternative. Just declare that if the government
pays for most of the research, resulting articles cannot be copyrighted. It is
already the case in the United States that most works by US government
employees cannot be copyrighted. Once there is no copyright, there is no way
to prevent distribution. If people paid to do the research, they should be
able to get the results. There really is no excuse anymore for the old
publishing System. It was important at one time, but its time has passed.

~~~
garmaine
Most of the work done by the US government is not done by civil servants but
by contractors, and the contractors hold the copyright. That tidbit of
copyright law is not as useful as you might expect.

~~~
markdown
I though that nonsense was only something that photographers did.

I do contract web dev work for clients all the time. Should I be retaining all
copyright?

~~~
jacquesm
That's a complex question. Most companies take care of this by requiring you
to explicitly sign over the rights to the work. There are two terms that you
should look into: 'work for hire' and 'automatic protection'.

A good place to start is here:

[http://www.wipo.int/copyright/en/faq_copyright.html](http://www.wipo.int/copyright/en/faq_copyright.html)

~~~
user5994461
In many jurisdictions, the work produced as a contractor or an employee
belongs to the company. There is no need to have a clause for it.

~~~
jacquesm
[https://www.itcontracting.com/software-development-source-
co...](https://www.itcontracting.com/software-development-source-code-who-
owns-it/)

~~~
user5994461
It's poorly written, throwing legal terms around out of their context. It does
not state the countries or states where it's supposed to apply.

Highly recommend to find a better source that than. Even the title is click
bait, the article doesn't talk about source code ownership.

------
Jerry2
> _Sci-Hub, a website that illicitly hosts full copies of papers and is used
> by academics around the world, is also a big factor, says Joseph Esposito, a
> publishing consultant in New York City. “Without Sci-Hub the researchers
> would be screaming at the libraries and state agencies not to cut them off,”
> he says._

Well, if you're going to bet your future on Sci-Hub, at least donate to the
project and start creating local laws that would allow local versions of Sci-
Hub archives.

~~~
garmaine
The sci-hub people have unfortunately been unwilling to allow backups of their
data.

~~~
labster
Just about 15 slots down on the front page there's a page about sci-hub
torrents:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17115176](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17115176)

~~~
mapt
There are abundant mentions of torrents, and little to no mention of
successful third-party mirroring efforts. The files are useless without
metadata and a database-driven site to use them with - is that stuff now
included?

~~~
Jerry2
> _and little to no mention of successful third-party mirroring efforts_

That's probably because space requirements are huge (tens of terabytes of
storage) and it's probably not legal in most jurisdictions (probably none of
them). Those two would probably stop most people who are thinking about this.

But let's say you managed to download and host it all and don't give a damn
about law (maybe a Tor node?), you'd still have to grapple with bandwidth
requirements for hosting such a huge collection of documents (including anti-
DDoS provisions). Finally, I don't think the database itself is offered by
anyone so you'd have to scrape the DOI data and create the front-end for the
website.

So unless you're rich and are willing to throw lots of money at this, I don't
think anyone is willing to do it for no financial benefit whatsoever (and a
massive downside if you get caught by the long arm of the US DOJ/FBI).

------
jacquesm
It's kind of morbidly hilarious how if this spreads to the US at some point
MIT will start using a service that they spent lots of effort to stop from
being engendered in the first place.

~~~
danielecook
what service is that?

~~~
jacquesm
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub)

"For her actions in creating Sci-Hub, Elbakyan has been called a hero and
"spiritual successor to Aaron Swartz"."

~~~
HarryHirsch
You ask why Elbakyan is politically protected but Swatrz was not. Does Russia
have no publishing conglomerates?

~~~
SXX
First of all she is hiding and possible not even within Russian border. So no
clue where your idea of political protection is come from. And there is little
point in arresting her: there are far more people working on project and
nothing going to happen if public face going to disappear.

What's more important it's can be tough to actually prove she actually did
something illegal on her own. Of course for political activists there is no
evidence required to put them in prison in Russia / Kazakhstan, but she is
pro-Kremlin so it's not apply here.

------
kss238
What exactly do these publishers do that causes them to charge so much? Aren't
they just hosting some pdfs and keeping editors on staff to look over the
papers?

~~~
overeater
While I agree that the publishers are asking for too much, what they provide
is the infrastructure and procedures for publishing. I think we'd both agree
startups like Yelp and AirBnB provide some non-zero value, yet I can also ask,
"What exactly do AirBnB and Yelp do that causes them to have a billion dollar
valuation? Aren't they just hosting some images/reviews and keeping editors on
staff to look over the posts?"

~~~
toxik
I feel like this is an unfair analogy. AirBnb and Yelp charge reasonable
prices and take a mostly reasonable cut, if any at all. The publishing houses
are charging enormous amounts, far beyond the value they add. Or so the
argument goes.

~~~
overeater
Sure, I think we both agree that the price is not proportional to the service
as I already stated. The grantparent post (and other posts here) was asking in
a way that implied they weren't doing more than hosting pdfs. I was just
pointing out that many of our lauded startups basically are just nothing more
than network effect and content hosting as well. And in fact, if they could
get away with charging Elsevier-like prices, they would immediately do so and
be celebrated for it.

~~~
mmt
> our lauded startups basically are just nothing more than network effect and
> content hosting as well

I think it would be more accurate to call them "controversial", at best,
rather than "lauded" or "celebrated", even here on HN.

To be fair, though, I don't think the controversy has tended to stem from them
not providing/creating value and merely being rent-seekers. Rather, it's
tended to be more regulatory issues (especially with AirBnB and the "gig
economy"). Yelp may be the most notable exception, as it's in hot water for
alleged extortion, which is easily rent-seeking, its content is user-
generated, and it depends on popularity, if not the network effect.

That said, with all those startups, it's relatively easy to point to what they
actually _do_ that's of non-trivial value to their users and/or customers.
With Elsevier, that's hard to identify, presumably because it simply doesn't
exist.

EDIT: "Infrastructure and procedures to publish" is _extremely_ thin, IMO.
Procedures are just a one-off document, and something the authors and the
volunteers that they outsource to do, not the "publisher". As for
infrastructure, I'm _willing_ to believe it, but, so far, all I've heard is
that they just take papers and send them back out, without providing anything
like publishing tools.

------
fwn
> “Without Sci-Hub the researchers would be screaming at the libraries and
> state agencies not to cut them off,” he says.

I think this is the money quote. The strength they show in contract
negotiations is only possible since no access just pretty much means
unlicensed access by now.

~~~
Y_Y
Back before sci-hub you'd just email a colleague at an institution with the
appropriate subscription. Even now I'm lazy enough to not read papers if I
have to jump through hoops to get the full text.

~~~
HarryHirsch
Yes, the library had preprinted postcards that you would send to the authors,
asking for a reprint. Researchers used to get 25 reprints per publication
(more at nominal charge), and they would keep them in a filing cabinet. Some
would collect stamps and/or show the reprint request around. (Look, another
stamp from Nigeria!)

------
jessaustin
Springer Nature, TFA's publisher, aren't really a disinterested party in this
discussion.

~~~
Quanttek
Article didn't seem biased to me though

~~~
jopsen
Failing to justify the existence of publishers seems like a bias to me.

Why don't universities forbid hosting of conferences that aren't open access.
Then years later forbid participation in such conferences.

We can pay publishers for another 10-20 years to access what they have. But we
should stop giving them content.

Publishing is practically free.

------
quotemstr
Am I the only person left who still worries about the incentive alignment
problem inherent in the pay-to-publish model? To a first approximation,
everyone wants to make more money. Journals under an open access model make
more money when they publish more articles, and the fastest way to publish
more articles is to lower standards and accept more articles for publication.

Researchers also have a strong incentive to publish as much as possible in
order to boost their citation counts, which serve as a proxy for prestige
these days and which factor heavily into tenure decisions. Since grants and
institutions[1] pay for open access publication fees, researchers have an
incentive to select "predatory" journals with low standards and high fees. We
already see this dynamic developing.

In short, all the incentives line up to encourage the publication of a large
volume of low-quality research. Science _already_ has a severe problem with
junk research, especially in the social sciences where a large fraction of
results simply do not reproduce. Do we want to make this problem even worse?

I'm sure the specific people involved in the system have the best intentions,
but as a matter of history and of human nature, good intentions are powerless
in the face of incentives. The most dangerous four-word phrase in human
history is "This time, it's different".

[1] Google, for example, will pay open-access publication fees.

~~~
dgacmu
I don't think the incentives on the researcher side are that poor. I can't pay
OA fees out of NSF awards. I have to do so out of discretionary funds, which
are substantially harder to come by. I think carefully before paying them.

Also, all of my colleagues would laugh at me if I published in a junk venue.
There's no win, at least in the top tier.

~~~
cossatot
Have you been specifically told by NSF that you can't? I have included OA
funds as line items in NSF (Earth Science division) budgets before, and never
received any flak. However, none of the grants ever got funded, so maybe they
didn't get the fine-toothed comb treatment following peer review.

~~~
dgacmu
No, just my business manager. It's possible I could do it if I line-item it in
the budget. I'll try that. :)

------
dang
Discussed a couple days ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17097561](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17097561).

------
sytelus
Does anyone know what's the deal with IEEE? Lots of papers I encounter behind
paywall are in IEEE Xplorer. I thought IEEE is non-profit institute (for
engineers, by engineers). Why do they participate in this? What can we as IEEE
members do to change this?

