> It does however provide a limit on how much money each publisher can extract from a paper.
Why should we accept publishers to decide on what this limit should be? Currently it can be as high as $5000. For hosting a PDF. This is a total waste of (mostly public) money.
> It also makes free or cheaper services more competitive.
No because as long as we permit to those publishers to exists and exercise their copyrights on prestigious journal title, their is a big inertia that incentivize researchers to publish with the publishers that hold the prestigious journal.
That's why we also need to get rid of bibliometrics for evaluating researchers for their career. Bibliometrics is the game of the publishers, and coincidentally, the biggest bibliometrics tools are made and sold by… publishers.
> Why should we accept publishers to decide on what this limit should be? Currently it can be as high as $5000. For hosting a PDF. This is a total waste of (mostly public) money.
I'm not sure there's a good way of limiting how much companies are allowed to charge for a service.
What the funding bodies can do, however, is limit the amount of money in a grant that can be spent on publishing costs. That's far easier.
> No because as long as we permit to those publishers to exists and exercise their copyrights on prestigious journal title, their is a big inertia that incentivize researchers to publish with the publishers that hold the prestigious journal.
There is a big inertia, but currently the system makes big journals just as financially attractive as small journals or free places to publish because there's no upfront cost. If big journals cost a lot of money and small/free journals don't, then there's actually a force pushing towards cheaper options. It changes the customer to one that has more control (the funding body).
I'm also not sure what you're suggesting with "exercise their copyrights on prestigious journal title".
> Bibliometrics is the game of the publishers, and coincidentally, the biggest bibliometrics tools are made and sold by… publishers.
I think this comes from the fact that the metadata around publications is unfortunately often not available in a decent form, and the people who actually have the data that's necessary for analysing these kinds of things is publishers, so anyone who wants to do certain types of analysis will benefit from either being in or partnering with a publisher.
[disclaimer, working with article and grant data is what I do at Digital Science]
> I'm not sure there's a good way of limiting how much companies are allowed to charge for a service.
That of course depends on one's subjective notion of "good". There are multiple ways of doing it. I like the one you suggest if the amount we are talking about is a round zero.
> I'm also not sure what you're suggesting with "exercise their copyrights on prestigious journal title".
If the members of a journal's scientific board decide they want to go full real open access (with no costs for readers nor authors), they have to abandon to name of the journal and the associated impact factor and reputation that they build together with their work over the years, because the publisher owns the journal even though it is the board members who did all the work (as part of their job as researchers, paid by the state or a uni for example, not by the publisher).
That's one of the reseaons why the movement for open access and the movement against the use of bibliometrics should unite.
Why should we accept publishers to decide on what this limit should be? Currently it can be as high as $5000. For hosting a PDF. This is a total waste of (mostly public) money.
> It also makes free or cheaper services more competitive.
No because as long as we permit to those publishers to exists and exercise their copyrights on prestigious journal title, their is a big inertia that incentivize researchers to publish with the publishers that hold the prestigious journal.
That's why we also need to get rid of bibliometrics for evaluating researchers for their career. Bibliometrics is the game of the publishers, and coincidentally, the biggest bibliometrics tools are made and sold by… publishers.