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Science Journals Are Laughing All the Way To the Bank, Locking the Results of Publicly Funded Research Behind Exorbitant Paywalls. This Must Be Stopped. (newscientist.com)
Here is a trivia question for you: what is the most profitable business in the world? You might think oil, or maybe banking. You would be wrong. The answer is academic publishing. Its profit margins are vast, reportedly in the region of 40 per cent. New Scientist: The reason it is so lucrative is because most of the costs of its content is picked up by taxpayers. Publicly funded researchers do the work, write it up and judge its merits. And yet the resulting intellectual property ends up in the hands of the publishers. To rub salt into the wound they then sell it via exorbitant subscriptions and paywalls, often paid for by taxpayers too.
The academic publishing business model is indefensible. Practically everybody -- even the companies that profit from it -- acknowledges that it has to change. And yet the status quo has proven extremely resilient. The latest attempt to break the mould is called Plan S, created by umbrella group cOAlition S. It demands that all publicly funded research be made freely available. When Plan S was unveiled in September, its backers expected support to snowball. But only a minority of Europe's 43 research funding bodies have signed up, and hoped-for participation from the US has failed to materialise. Meanwhile, a grass-roots campaign against it is gathering momentum. Plan S deserves a chance.
The academic publishing business model is indefensible. Practically everybody -- even the companies that profit from it -- acknowledges that it has to change. And yet the status quo has proven extremely resilient. The latest attempt to break the mould is called Plan S, created by umbrella group cOAlition S. It demands that all publicly funded research be made freely available. When Plan S was unveiled in September, its backers expected support to snowball. But only a minority of Europe's 43 research funding bodies have signed up, and hoped-for participation from the US has failed to materialise. Meanwhile, a grass-roots campaign against it is gathering momentum. Plan S deserves a chance.
If all of the public research was public, then we'd all be able to see how much of it is a sham.
This is of course a great reason to mandate that all publicly funded research be made completely free to access. For-Pay journals could well survive just by curating the most interesting an accurate of them, and it's likely the quality of journals would go up as a result.
Building back up the credibility of science in general is a huge need at present, because the lack of it is allowing things like anti-vac sentiment and other crazy ideas to spread like wildfire.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Reviewers and editors often don't get paid for their work. It's considered a synergistic activity and is often viewed favorably when applying for grants. The real costs are copy editors, printing costs, and maintaining servers. Arguably, printing costs should be covered by subscribers rather than contributors. I'd like to see restrictions on public funding used to pay for publication in for-profit journals, especially predatory open access journals and publishers with paywalls.
In my field of meteorology, some of the most impactful journals are operated by professional societies like the American Meteorological Society (AMS), and this is how other fields should work as well. I don't like AMS putting papers behind paywalls and charging high prices unless an open access fee is paid, though at least it's only behind the paywall for something like three years. While AMS could be better, it's a very viable alternative to publishers that bury articles behind expensive paywalls in perpetuity. Funding agencies should encourage and insist that results be published in these types of journals.
.humor.
.humor.
Bureaucrats, our Educational System, the Establishment, the Government, Politicians and Scientists are beyond reproach. They only have the good of humanity on their minds. They continually sacrifice their own welfare for humanity as a whole.
This must be Fake News!
No government money is going to middlemen who offer nothing of value.
It's basically hijacking taxpayer content at this this point and reselling something they got for free.
If it's publicly funded it should be accessible to the public.
As a computational biologists in europe, i see a notable change in granting bodies that require open access publications. We have to put this in writing when we apply for grants. This happens on both national and EU level, so my experience is quite different than tfa.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
You're wrong. The post you're replying to is mostly correct.
As an author, I have to pay for page charges when a manuscript I submitted gets accepted for publication. Saying the publishers get the content for free isn't quite an accurate picture because the author has to actually pay the publisher.
The content is potentially being locked away, because authors generally have to sign over their copyrights in the process. In the journals I've published in, authors retain limited rights, such as being allowed to use figures in funding proposals. However, there are significant restrictions, so the content is, in effect, being locked away.
Fuck Elsevier, and the politicians that support their parasitic business model. Visit scihub for all the academic papers you need. Tell your friends.
Piracy was the only practical way to demonstrate your unhappiness with the music industry. It looks like the science journals will have to learn the hard way too.
Academic publishers have every right to protect their intellectual property and charge for access.
By "intellectual property", do you refer to patents, trademarks, or trade secrets in addition to copyrights? If so, which? The appropriate policy reasoning is likely to depend on the significant differences among these areas of law. If not, why use the term "intellectual property" instead of "copyright" which is both shorter and more precise?
And why haven't we seen a price war among journals to attract subscribers from other journals?
Considering the fact that the writers are using my tax money to create that property, shouldn't I get some stock/compensation for said property?
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Never forget what these people did to Aaron Swartz.
They have killed to protect their business model.
Never doubt they'll do it again.
[End Of Line]
Say a particular article is the result of research funded by a particular country. Would it be acceptable if access to that article without charge were region locked to its sponsor country, where one would need to log in with a taxpayer ID and password to view it?
The push toward open access publishing has led to the creation of [...] journals that charge publication fees of the authors
So far, you've described a vanity press.
and claim to conduct peer review, but don't actually do so.
Here's an exercise: Define what is and isn't adequate peer review.
I've heard allegations that those journals also may threaten legal action against people who accuse them of being predatory.
Once you have somewhat rigorously defined peer review, you can collect and present evidence that a particular publication acts as a vanity press. This evidence should make a defense in a defamation suit practical.
This really depends on the field. I've worked with physics, chemistry and astronomy journals. Publishing fees for the author are only there for open access (and not all of them). The publisher retains copyright only on the edited, formatted version of the paper, or in a couple cases retains full copyright but explicitly lets the author do what they want with the preprint (I've heard this is very different in the biological sciences). So pretty much the vast majority of physics and astronomy papers get put on ArXiV or on a university website for free, even if they author didn't pay the publishing fee. And that fee is usually a flat rate (other fields differ), so the only time I hear of it as a page charge is when you exceed the page limit, and many detail oriented journals don't have a page limit so you could avoid those charges easily for long papers.
I find the title of this story pretty awkward though. Journals seem like just about any other industry, where there are a couple really big players that are capable of rent-seeking, and a bunch of small ones that barely get by. I've worked at a journal before, both private and an open one run as a non-profit. No one there is getting rich, and instead it was mostly people laid off from newspapers and magazine industry just happy to have a job. I saw several people leave to do freelance copy-editing, because if you are decent at it and can sell yourself well, they made way more doing free lance copy-editing for scientists doing PR pieces, helping scientists that don't natively speak English, or publishing in cheaper journals that didn't do copy-editing.
But yes, we still did edit and spend a lot of time formatting papers (scientists are really bad at this, and you can look at some conference proceedings that are completely volunteer based and lack almost any formatting beyond a basic template that many authors break). So the idea that journal staff does nothing of value is not universally true. A lot of people wrangling is done too, because the editorial board is part time so employees help try to keep things organized so the editors only have to worry about reviewers being a correct match and interpreting their reviews. Some of the journals used to have graphic artists on hands to help with diagrams, but that became too expensive and was no longer done at the places I've worked with.
The editors are volunteers, but they do get paid an honorarium. People often try to yell about how all editors are complete volunteers and get no money out of it, which is often but not universally true. Hell, I still get paid about once a year for reviewing a paper. It is not much, and it is often for a conference proceedings where a bit of extra money from the conference can pay the reviewers as a reward to sticking to strict deadline for proceedings (e.g. finish reviews before conference is over).
The rub is that they get their funding from public funds. So it's not really their IP.
Publicly funded researchers do the work, write it up and judge its merits. And yet the resulting intellectual property ends up in the hands of the publishers.
This quotation is blatantly false. The rest of the summary is flamebait.
1. The IP generated by the research, depending on funding source, goes to the inventor, their employer, and, sometimes, the funding source. The COPYRIGHT of the publication sometimes, goes to the publisher, depending on a lot of factors. (*)
2. If you are getting public funds (i.e., NIH funds), you have enough to pay for open-access fees, and, then, the authors retain copyright. Don't agree? A typical R01 grant (the bread-and-butter of NIH funding) is for $250,000 per year for a handful of years, typically 3-5. That pays for about two people and generous running costs, maybe three, if you can supplement NIH-set salary from some other source (why so few, you ask? In round numbers, each person is about $50K in salary, plus 30-35% in benefits; if they are students, the cost is slightly higher because although the wage is lower, the lab is typically on the hook for tuition). If your lab is very productive, your people will be putting out 2 papers per year. Best case, that's 6 publications per year. Costs vary, but for high-profile journals, open-access is about $2000 per paper. Remember those generous running costs? They can easily include $12,000 in publication fees. If, as a lab head, you haven't included those costs in your budget, you are not doing your job right. And if, as a lab head, you can't get additional funding while pumping out 6 good papers per year, you should look for other work. There's just no good excuse to avoid publishing open-access, even if your papers appear in top-tier journals.
3. We can argue long and hard about appropriate levels for open-access fees and appropriate levels of profitability for journals, but the basic assumptions of the inflammatory summary are incorrect.
(*) If, somehow, the journal ends up with copyright, and you want to use some part of the publication in additional work, the fees typically are not that expensive. Often, if it is the original author requesting re-use, it's free. Also, in the US, all publicly-funded research becomes effectively open-access after one year by law, and there's a pretty good chance that that one-year grace period is going to go away, soon.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
I publish in the field of atmospheric science. The American Meteorological Society journals are the "gold standard" amongst my research peers. While I am not happy with how much it costs to publish and subscribe to the AMS journals (the former is covered by NSF grants, the latter is "subsidized" by the university), all I know as a scientist is (a) I have to publish there to get maximum impact (b) I have to read everything in there to keep up and because the authors will likely be reviewing my future manuscript submissions. If, tomorrow, the AMS journals drastically changed their subscription model - making it open access, dropping the cost to subscribe and/or publish, etc., it would not make a single bit of difference to me, and to probably most other scientists publishing in AMS journals. Everyone would continue to submit and review, because that's where you publish, and if you don't publish there, the "right" people might not read your work.
A major change in the business model for journals would radically affect the journals themselves, and in atmospheric science in the US, the AMS itself which produces the journals. I don't think many of us weather-heads want to see the AMS fail because it does a ton of great stuff (advocacy, education, conferences, etc.), like similar organizations in other fields. But, without us scientists doing peer review for free, all "refereed" journals cease to exist, but so long as you have scientists willing to do the peer review, journals can certainly exist without much staff (many of whom are publishing scientists themselves). So we collectively wield a lot of power should we choose to use it but I personally don't know any other scientists who are willing to die on that particular hill, we're all mostly busy doing our science and trying to scrape some funding together in an extremely competitive environment.
I suspect governments themselves (as was mentioned upthread with the EU) will have to catalyze the real change. Currently AMS journal articles are open to the public after 1 year, with select articles available right away. If NSF decided tomorrow that it was not allowable to ask for more than [dollaramount] of page charges per article in NSF budgets, it would have a real, immediate impact on the problem addressed in the article.
Anyhow put me down as another academic type who definitely agrees that things should change, but also as someone who is not going to spend any time advocating for it simply because it's too big of an issue and I have grants and papers to write (sorry, just being honest here). Switching to a new (read: inferior) set of journals is not a viable option, and that is where the journals wield their real power - we need them (because all the important people read Important X Journal), and they need us to maintain their quality via the peer review process. It's probably going to take an outside force to break the current model; it's hard enough to get funded/tenured/promoted as it is, much less without deliberately publishing in the "wrong" journals.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
academic publishing. The answer is academic publishing. Its profit margins are vast, reportedly in the region of 40 per cent.
Hyperbole doesn't help make the argument. Many forms of digital asset distribution, such as software sales, have profit margins at least as high. Even chip manufacturing has gross profit in the region of 40%, higher for some boutique parts.
Agree that academic publishing has degenerated to a harmful racket.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Remember Alexandra Elbakyan? Science's Pirate Queen. She's the creator or Sci-Hub, the website that provides free access to millions of paywalled and open-access research papers and books - illegally. Alexandra Elbakyan deserves the highest respect possible because she has risked everything to provide free access to published research - it's that important to her.
The world needs Plan S. to succeed. It's that important.
Considering the fact ... shouldn't I get some stock/compensation?
You got screwed. What else do you want?
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
Aaron Swartz repeatedly disabled a non-profit service that helps scientific research around the world. He could have plugged his laptop into his own network connection at his office at Harvard, and instead chose to plug his laptop into a wiring closet at MIT and abuse their network resources and interfer with _their_ research. He faced criminal charges for his cowardly abuse, and took the coward's way out rather than face his day in court. He was the abuser, not the abused.
This is where most of the journals came from. They were originally the newsletters of scientific societies which were effectively formed from letters that members would write in with when they had results to share. Hence the reason many have "letters" in the name.
As the number of letters grew it became too much effort and expense for these societies to publish all of them given the technology of the day and so they sold them off to professional publishers who organized the peer review, editing and publishing and then charged a fee to cover their costs and make a profit.
Today technology has now caught up and publishing costs and effort have both been enormously reduced to the point where a professional publisher is no longer required. What we need to see happen is journals returning to being run by professional science societies. If you make membership in the society a requirement to publish in their journals and make the journals available for free then I expect this would easily drive up income from membership dues enough to cover the modest costs of organizing peer review, editing and electronic publishing. It would also avoid the "pay-to-publish" model that causes a conflict of interest: you have to be a member to submit regardless of whether it is accepted and the cost of membership is usually rather modest so even non-professional scientists can afford it.
I'd really like to see all journals be open.
One problem that arises is that science puts a lot of weight on research published in high impact refereed journals. There is a general believe that a paper in Nature or Science or the like has been carefully reviewed. The really is due to the reputation of those journals.
Open journals may eventually gain the same reputation, but it is not an instant process. There are a lot of junk journals out there that will claim to referee, but are really "pay to publish" - anything you send them will be published.
So if science moves away from traditional journals, how can the interested, but non-expert (in the field) public know what has actually been reviewed. How can funding agencies judge the quality of research form publicly funded science?
I expect that in the long term some open journals will develop widely recognized reputations. (remember a reputation just in a field doesn't help with the above problems). I just don't see how to get there quickly.
In the 70â(TM)s I had 4 papers published in peer reviewed journals. For this my grants had to pay for this (think taxpayer money). Because of this, the articles were marked as advertising. And, if you wanted to read the article, additional payment was necessary. Similarly as companies that socialize losses but privatize profits.
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" -- Dr. Strangelove
These complaints have gone on for decades, but all attempts by the scientific community to bypass of replace the big private academic publishers have resulted in systems with equally exorbitant costs, like the Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals. The only difference is that instead of university libraries, scientists pay the costs from their grants. The last paper I published in an open-access journal cost me almost $3000 in publication fees. And the journal claims that still does not cover its full costs of publication!
What you mean is that too many studies are underpowered, so you get a lot of false positives over the 0.95 bar.
We can fix this by making every study 4 to 10 times more expensive (everybody gets a huge N, except perhaps in the cases where the study population is finite, regardless of budget).
Would we actually be better off, or have you just made science twice as expensive as it really needs to be?
Another implicit assumption is that if a scientist (or team) publishes a paper that later fails to replicate, that all the money invested in the study was completely wasted (government waste is by tradition consigned to money-up-in-flames category, including tax revenues that the government immediately pays out again as citizen benefits, merely because some government official touched it—COOTIES—on the way through).
The every-failure-is-a-100%-writeoff presumption isn't true in Silicon Valley (many failed entrepreneurs learn invaluable lessons) and it isn't true in science, either.
Shouldn't this all be covered by the Freedom of Information Act? What taxpayers pay for, taxpayers should have access to, or else we shouldn't be funding them.
Just another day in Paradise