I think it's an issue of copyright law being ridiculous.
Nonfiction and scientific work should be treated differently than fictional works. I don't really care if Mickey Mouse goes into the public domain. But it's crazy that 100 year old scientific works can still be under copyright and illegal to distribute. These objectively have value to society, and the argument for the existence of the public domain is much stronger.
It shouldn't last indefinitely. Maybe only 10 or 15 years. I believe 99% of all works make most of their money in the first few years. Having copyright last a lifetime, let alone much longer, is just crazy.
Put a cost on renewing copyright. This is actually how it used to be. Half way through, you could pay a fee to have copyright extended. Very few people paid this fee (because most works aren't economically valuable), so most works went into public domain much sooner. Journals charge $30 to access obscure ancient papers. But I bet they wouldn't pay even $30 to keep the rights to those same papers.
Don't put everything into copyright by default. And again especially works of nonfiction or scientific papers. If the authors want that, then sure. This wouldn't fix the issues with big journals that demand it. But it still seems like a sensible idea to have copyright opt-in, not opt-out.
Fictional works are not a special case. I'd personally argue copyright never made sense, but people like to say back when the marginal cost of producing duplicates of information was greater than nothing, copyright at least functioned.
Remember, today, there are millions of people using their computer to voluntarily and entirely charitably give away information for free, that other people want to stop them from doing. That is so absurd and insane.
I've said it before, and many of us will inevitably say it again, but this is not 1800. Charge for what is valuable and scarce, your creativity (or in the case of a scientist, their knowledge), not what is not valuable or scarce, which is bits on a hard drive.
To help categorize and understand: I'd characterize your argument as the "Stallman" argument, where the simplicity of copying justifies the moral argument against copyright.
There is a alternate vein which doesn't have to do with value or scarcity, but which has to do with rivalrousness (that is a very subtle distinction):
That is an excellent argument from what I would also call the big picture perspective. I just usually use the utilitarian one because it just seems any time you want to argue about social fundamentals - be it anything from segregated bathrooms (of all varieties) to street naming to intellectual property, people get incredibly defensive about the status quo as if their livelihood depended on it - as if culture / information cannot be made without IP, rather than the reverse.
I do think at some point in the future historians will look back and see the catastrophic death of culture permanent copyright wrought throughout the 20th / 21st centuries as a huge crime against humanity. We are sad we have few historical recounts of ancient Egyptian / Greek / Roman living, or even moreso ancient Mesoamerican peoples, or the Babylonians, but we seem perfectly complacent in how some ~95% of all music, film, photography, writing, and even probably code is lost forever because of copyright meaning if the owners take it to their grave it stays dead with them. It is just a tremendous disservice to humanity to just let so much creative work die like that, and how generations have now grown and died without any of the commercial works of their childhood ever being accessible to their own creativeness in their lifetimes.
Future historians will view those who today take steps to 'liberate' and 'preserve' the modern culture as the heros and those who sought to lock it away as villains.
Either that, or I fear we face a future as described in Idiocracy.
I think this is a mis-representation of Stallman's point. Notice that Stallman has his non-code media mostly under a no-derivatives creative commons license.
From what I understand, Stallman is concerned about making sure our infrastructure is free (as in freedom). The simplicity of copying is almost a tangential issue. His point is that for a society to be considered free (democratic, empowered, etc.) the people need access in a meaningful way to the infrastructure that helps create that society. To me, his point is a natural extension of forcing government documents to be under public domain and providing architectural blueprints for public scrutiny.
Maybe I'm wrong and mis-interpreting Stallman's point. Do you have a reference that would support your claimed stance on Stallman's 'ease of copying = moral justification against copyright' interpretation?
No, Stallman is a copyright supporter. He just sees it as a tool to empower users. And from his perspective, it makes some sense. If everything were IP liberated, there would be no compulsion to release source code, but my optimism makes me hope that if you cannot profit off software sales, you have no reason not to also disclose the source.
If you can only make money off people paying you to write the software, having the broadest audience becomes crucial, and in such a world (much in the same way most developer tools work outside the MS ecosystem) not being free software would mean nobody would fathom using your software.
That was a good read. I'd be interested to see the author address trademarks and branding, because that's where you find the intersection of identity (rivalrous in her thesis) and the creative arts (non-rivalrous).
The author states that cultural works increase in value the more they are shared. At the risk of debating semantics ("shared", "value") — would Disney still be a $50B company if anyone had been allowed to release a Mickey Mouse cartoon?
Mickey Mouse is a trademark too, so once out of copyright one could release a cartoon featuring the character but not a "Mickey Mouse cartoon" per se. It's not clear to me if you could even call the mouse Mickey and avoid infringing the trademark.
I'm not sure about that. Once out of copyright you couldn't release a cartoon featuring the character (as that's a trademark), but you could make copies of steamboat willie and freely distribute the content over the internet (or VHS).
I don't know about nina, but I personally see trademark as the only "valid" one of the three forms of IP (precisely because of rivalrousness). On the other hand, there are always things which challenge me: David Tran does not trademark Sriracha.
I somewhat agree with you, but I'm trying to propose a reasonable compromise. Let Disney keep the mouse copyrighted forever, but give us scientific works that have lots of value being public. Maybe we should try to get fictional works freed later, but at least everyone can agree on this.
Reproduction is not the only cost. There is also a large cost in actually making the thing in the first place.
"Remember, today, there are millions of people using their computer to voluntarily and entirely charitably give away information for free, that other people want to stop them from doing. That is so absurd and insane."
Only until you remember that what they're trying to share wasn't theirs in the first place.
If you create something, great, share it with everyone you want. But don't you dare force others into doing the same thing with what they created.
I don't understand why marginal cost going down causes copyright to make less sense; I'd argue it now makes more sense, as creators can more easily lose out.
Copyright is intended to incentivize people to create things by giving them a limited monopoly on the ability to copy/distribute it. I write a book, no one else can print and sell copies without my permission. Thus I have a chance to make some money off it. If I write a book and anyone can sell it, I'm less likely to make money off it.
If that argument was true in 1800 when some other guy had to physically print out my book, why is it somehow not true today when you can upload a torrent of it?
(I do think current copyright terms are absolutely absurd. If they were 10 years or renewable with fees or anything else that would solve 95% of the problems.)
Because in 1800 someone had to spend some money making copies. If you have no copyright back then, the argument (albeit wrong, in my mind) would go that you needed the monopoly power to stop your published works being immediately undercut by bootleg copiers, because they did not have the upfront costs of actually producing the novel material.
In practice, even that explanation reflects on the insanity of copyright, in that you should never get to the point where you have done free work and now need the state to assist you in making a living off it. You should be seeking compensation for the act of creation, not for the act of copying.
For the same reasons people habitually treat fan works as independent from commercial ones, today people are doing the work for free when in the 18th century you could make a business out of duplicating others written works for profit.
Today, while counterfeiting markets like that still exist in less Internet-rich countries, once you have the Internet, the only thing such markets still apply to are novel physical inventions, and that is never done by small entrepenurs stealing other peoples work, it is by large corporations using economies of scale to produce replcias of a novel product that can undercut the original creator.
Because there is an important distinction between goods and information. A good is valuable for what it is - a fridge because it cools, a car because it can move on roads. The utility is in the physical atomic composition of the product. With informational works, which is what copyright applies to, the value is exclusively in the encoded information - you can transfer it in myriad forms, from light to electrons to magnetism to etchings on a wall, but in those circumstances the media of transit is much less relevant than the material itself.
It was only when the transit material was itself scarce that the argument for copyright was made. When transit becomes so cheap it is effectively free where millions will send you a copy for no charge, the assumptions are broken.
Once again, your entire argument hinges on forgetting that there is a cost to creating the material in the first damn place. And the way you recoup those costs today is to sell copies of the work. The transit method isn't relevant, because the purpose of copyright was to allow the creator to recoup costs in creating the work, not in selling it.
> I think it's an issue of copyright law being ridiculous.
I disagree, scientists generally aren't seeking to get money by people buying a copy of their paper (if anything they're currently paying so people can read it) there's no need for them to invoke copyright law at all, in fact that would be against their own interest.
The problem is that the current system forces scientists to publish in journals, which will happily charge an arm and a leg for the privilege, and invoke whatever law they can to make more money, even if this goes directly against the interests of the scientists who wrote the papers.
The Journals wouldn't be an issue in the first place without copyright law. And fixing copyright solves problems beyond scientific Journals. You could have nonfiction books in general, textbooks, etc, all available to the public domain.
1. Scientists aren't at the heart of the scientific Open Access problem. Journals are.
2. The fact that copyright exists means that journals can then request it be transferred (or licensed) to the journal. For what's effectively forever.
3. Journals exercise gatekeeper access over scientists' careers, in that publishing in prestige journals is how scientists advance academically. This is de facto* coercive control over scientists.
4. With that control, journals compell publication of articles in controlled journals, for scientists to advance, require subscriptions of libraries (who otherwise forgo access to the material), and maintain a bank of virtually all scientific papers published since 1924 as an absolute monopoly.
Hence: no copyright, or a far-less-rediculous copyright, say, 14, 28, or 54 years (as was historically the case, via registration(s) and/or renewals), and much the problem would disappear.
The additional factor of deadweight costs of denied access to virtually all of humanity for this material is the other cost.
> And again especially works of nonfiction or scientific papers.
As much as I feel that science---especially publicly funded science (which almost all of it is)---ought to be freely available fairly quickly, I think making a distinction for the purposes of copyright law between fiction and non-fiction is fairly hairy. Clearly "A Streetcar Named Desire" is fiction, but what about memoirs? Poetry? The Onion? Dianetics? The output of human writing spans a continuum of factual-ness, and it's not obvious to me that there's a good way to draw a line.
Even in the hardest of sciences, it's often underappreciated how much interpretation and creative energy goes into a paper.
The legal system is not applied by computers, but by humans. That's why laws don't have to be written in a way that pre-defines every possible edge case - you can let judges make a common sense judgment call about it later.
For example you could have a rule that anybody who makes a work available "in good faith" in the belief that it is a scientific paper out of copyright is not liable to damages. Then all edge cases would be cleared in the context of take-down requests, which is not very high stakes...
> The legal system is not applied by computers, but by humans. That's why laws don't have to be written in a way that pre-defines every possible edge case - you can let judges make a common sense judgment call about it later.
That's a very US-centric (or to be precise, Anglo-Saxon centric) statement. The vast majority of countries in the world uses a civil-law system instead of common-law system. In civil-law system, codes and statutes are designed and supposed to cover all edge cases and eventualities
I'm a lawyer in a civil-law system and I would not agree with this description. Maybe one can say that in theory civil law systems have more legislation and are less comfortable with "judge made law", leaving the filling of gaps to the legislative powers. But it would be impossible to write laws that cover all cases, therefore every civil law system relies on general principles.
For example, the whole German tort law is basically: "A person who, intentionally or negligently, unlawfully injures the life, body, health, freedom, property or another right of another person is liable to make compensation to the other party for the damage arising from this."
When is a behavior negligent? What falls under the "another right of another person" (your reputation, your privacy?)?
Does the owner of a highway-restaurant get damages if a negligent chemicals transport company does not secure its load properly, leading to dangerous chemicals spilled on the highway, leading to closure of the highway for a week = meaning no customers for a week? [damage to property???] These are all questions that are totally up for a judge to decide.
Classifying if a work is a scientific or a non-scientific publication - or at least if somebody might have classified it as scientific in good faith - is nothing that a civil law jurisdiction can't deal with. Other areas of law have much harder conceptual distinctions. (E.G. Are parent and subsidiary company having an "at arms length" relationship as required in transfer pricing tax law?)
Right, I don't actually disagree with your statement in principle, it was more of a nit-picking kind of thing. Most law system would not be cleanly civil or common law, but a gradient between the two. I guess I was thinking it being more of an issue in country with bad judiciary system.
Fiction and nonfiction seems like a very natural way to categorize works. Is anyone really going to argue that scientific papers are works of fiction? Would any reasonable court hold that up? All laws have to deal with the natural fuzziness of concept space. But if libraries can manage it successfully, surely the copyright office can.
1. The strange cave of Ali Baba (or how to explain Zero-Knowledge protocols to your children) - Jean-Jacques Quisquater - Advances in Cryptology - 1990.
2. The fable of the Tyrant Dragon - Nick Bostrom - Journal of Medical Ethics, 2005¹.
This is a work of fiction designed to make a statement about the stance of society towards fighting aging.
The categorization could go either way. Leave it up to the copyright office to decide.
However given the context of an allegory in a larger work of nonfiction, or it's publication in a nonfiction scientific journal, I would lean towards saying it should be nonfiction.
> Fiction and nonfiction seems like a very natural way to categorize works.
But what about
- popular scientific books
- popular scientific books that embed the science into a nice story
or
- science fiction books
- "hard" science fiction books, which are strongly oriented on physical theories
- a description of a highly experimental physical theory embedded in a nice framework of how alien civilizations might take use of technology that this theory enables
or
- Books about historical facts
- Novels that are strongly based on historical facts and even interviews with contemporary witnesses, that nevertheless use some little literary license (for example The Gulag Archipelago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago).
- Novels that are based on historical facts that nevertheless take some literary license to make the story more exciting
- Fictional story that is occured in some concrete non-fictional historic time
or
- A scientific description of some ethical thought experiment
- A novel that is based on some ethical thought experiment, where in the story some academic person gives a quite scientifically accurate description of the thought experiment
- A novel that is based on some ethical thought experiment
See my comment above replying to someone else. There might be some fuzziness, but in context it's easy to classify. And for the weird outliers, the copyright office can make the call on how to classify them. Almost all of these seem pretty straightforward to classify. Just ask yourself what category you would find the work in a library?
>popular scientific books
Certainly nonfiction.
>popular scientific books that embed the science into a nice story
Not sure what you mean, but that sounds like fiction even if it has some science in it.
>hard" science fiction books, which are strongly oriented on physical theories
Same thing.
>Novels that are strongly based on historical facts and even interviews with contemporary witnesses, that nevertheless use some little literary license (for example The Gulag Archipelago
Well your own wikipedia link classifies it as fiction at the bottom. In fact all the examples of novels that are loosely based on truth are fiction.
But no one is ever going to claim a scientific paper is a work of fiction, and should be protected for 100+ years.
>A scientific description of some ethical thought experiment
This seems like the only fuzzy example. But such a thought experiment will almost always be in the context of a larger nonfiction work. And it will be published in a place like a scientific journal with other nonfiction, and be placed in the nonfiction section of a library. So that seems like the most practical and natural classification, legally.
Non-fiction pop sci isn't funded in the same way as scientific research.
Authors are paid to write pop sci, and it's very hard to produce a good book without getting paid an advance which allows a significant amount of full-time research.
If you create a system that can't pay advances, you're limiting pop sci to amateur efforts and short Wikipedia articles.
It's true a lot of pop sci isn't all that great. But the best books are literally life changing, and it's really not the best idea in the world to make it impossible to fund them.
>But no one is ever going to claim a scientific paper is a work of fiction, and should be protected for 100+ years.
There should be no question that scientific papers should be public, because the public has already paid for them.
Private research can be protected by patents, so there's no reason not to share the research with the public as long as commercial implementations are protected.
Hold on, I never said completely abolish copyright for nonfiction. I suggested reducing it to 10 or 15 years. Most pop sci will have no economic value after 10 years, so it shouldn't change anything.
It's utterly ridiculous that an out of print 1950's textbook by a dead author, is still protected by copyright. How is society benefiting from this arrangement at all?
I think in general scientific discoveries (pharmaceuticals, algorithms etc) should not be granted monopolistic production rights, but rather monopolistic royalty rights.
So, for example, if you invented Viagara, and every pharma company in the world figured out how to make it cheaper in their own way, they're free to make it but they have to pay the creator (individual or corporation) a royalty fee to do so.
I think royalties are a better way to incentivize innovation while not allowing patent protections to stifle the market as a whole.
The problem is there is no objective way to set the price of the royalty. Pharma companies won't invest in a drug that is only worth $1 per pill. And some pills will need to be taken for a lifetime, while others only need to be taken once - but the value of curing a disease is the same.
Yeah that's a good point. Maybe instead it could be a fee you could have to pay the creator to sell the same thing up to some limit, maybe determined by the creator's market price?
Of course. I'd prefer that journals switch to open access, and that governments demand publicly funded research to be released in the public domain. My proposals are independent of that policy.
If you're doing a startup trying to innovate in the research and academic journal space I'd love to talk to you. I've put out requests for contact in HN comment threads like this before and gotten great responses and great conversations, and one even resulted in a funding round.
I'm a shareholder and board member of SAGE Publications, which was founded by my grandparents. SAGE is about the 5th largest journal publisher and is and will remain a private family-owned company. I know it's hard to believe, but publishers aren't one homogenous evil entity plotting how to rip off the public. There are lots of fucked up things about the journal system, many of which publishers have caused or been complicit in. But there are also a lot of complicated factors that are entirely outside publishers' ability to change. Academia is a mess in a lot of ways, and much of the overall dysfunction of the whole system has manifested in what has become the hard to comprehend journal publishing system of today.
I live in Oakland and would love to meet up with anyone who happens to be in the Bay Area, or just have Skype calls no matter where you are. My contact info is in my HN profile. Drop me an email and I'd love to pick your brain to hear about how you're approaching academic publishing.
We've funded two startups in the last few years. PeerJ is an open access journal undercutting the traditional publishers AND most OA publishers (like PLOS) on price. Publons is trying to provide incentives for peer review and encourage openness in the peer review process. We'd love to find a few more good companies doing truly innovative stuff that will have an impact on academic publishing.
Considering she's being sued by Elsevier I don't fault her for not wanting to talk to any publishers. There probably isn't anything I can say that would convince her I'm not trying to entrap her in some way. But yeah, she's got an open invitation to an audience with the owners and upper management at SAGE, even if she just wanted to tell us off.
Maybe you did not offer a fair enough compensation for that service. She has lots of important work improving horrible state of scientific knowledge dissemination. I don't think she has much time for consulting private corporations, unless adequately compensated.
I used to work for the Public Knowledge Project (https://pkp.sfu.ca/) which has been directly impacting the Open Access movement for years. Not a sexy startup, but they have great reach and have helped many academics publish research papers openly since the early 2000's.
Good work on both startups. Glad your firm is open to opportunities to improve the situation. I'll make a note of it in case I run into someone whose work might interest you.
This reminded me of back 30 years ago or more when I first was messing around with Arpanet and it was just turning into the Internet, I remember how all of my friends and I were so stoked about how it was going to change the world because everyone would have access to all the knowledge in the world and how exciting that was, the democratization of knowledge. We speculated on how everyone in the future would be so much smarter because they would have access to so much information and knowledge. Some of that is true, but sadly, not entirely. Much of the greatest knowledge is locked away. And even sadder still, so many people do not really cherish what we have and instead use it for a lot of ridiculous nonsense, which, I guess is me being Judgmental about what the internet should be used for. I guess what it really shows, is that the future often does not turn out the way you thought it would . I think this is a case like that, we thought knowledge would flow freely like from a fountain or oracle of wisdom, but instead it is filled with 140 character snotty comments and pictures of cats with fruit on their heads. Sorry for the rant.
I feel like the internet mostly held this ideal until the runup to the first dotcom bubble. Then the business people took over, and, as they tend to do, converted these principles into something more suitable for monetization; putting it in the hands of as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, through appeals to ego and emotion instead of reason and rationality.
And here we are today, where the best knowledge is locked up behind paywalls and "cute" and "the new sincerity" (what a load of crap...) reign supreme.
A lot of people have been using this sort of upbeat, 'I'm your friend'-style marketing, with lots of cute flourishes and 'built with love' BS.
I've seen it called it 'The New Sincerity' in the sense that it is supposed to be about craftsmen displaying sincere (in the sense that they believe in its 'awesomeness') enthusiasm for their work; unfortunately in the process it has been co-opted by spin doctors and marketing people, filtered down to its emotional essence (cute, happy, lies about friendship, lots of awesomeness), and then used repeatedly until the next fad comes.
One of the largest examples I can think of is the hipster-y, craft aesthetic (crossed arrows are particularly overused cliche). Come to think of it I think the SF hipster clique were some of its original proponents.
I always thought it meant the turn towards art, literature, film, etc. whose themes are actually in earnest, after decades of every bloody thing being ironic.
TL;DR: "We got tired of being sarcastic all the time, so this time we decided to say something we actually mean."
Reminds me of a comic I saw here once about a guy who grew up on utopian 70s Scifi magazines and grew up to find the 90s would actually become... well... see for yourself.
I'm speculating here but there might actually be a lot of knowledge out there created by the internet that you don't really see - like little details about mundane aspects of life that people previously had no concept of, but aren't controversial.
You know what, thank you, you are right, every time I am depressed about the crap I see online, then I see something really great. you take the good with the bad, just like life :)
I'm curious what happens if we would design a parallel web, ruled by a benevolent dictator that really wants to help humanity, in the wide and deep sense(and we're lucky and it doesn't turn into a bloodbath) - how would that internet look like ? and is it even a possible goal for a niche of the population ?
You'll still be left with free market like system - and the result won't be far from what we have today. For example the incentives around something like facebook will be similar.
No - you really need benevolent dictatorship at the site/content level.
I try to avoid citing articles that are only available behind a paywall. Even though there isn’t always an alternative source available, if enough people favour citing open-access articles over paywalled ones, that should create an incentive to publish in open-access journals, because in academia, citations are everything. (That is a problem in itself, but it is the status quo.)
I wish everyone would do this. Like a code of honor akin to a copyleft license: if you use open access references, your article should be open access too.
When reproducing findings of an openly accessible paper it's extremely frustrating when some of the references are unreachable.
I'm not in academia so for one I don't have university access to papers and for two I often need to trickle down the references to fill knowledge gaps.
It's just not always possible to do that. I know it can be frustrating to not have ready access to academic journals, but you can usually find the article one way or another. Many journals are allowing pre-print publications to reside on open-access archives ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_journals_by_p... ), some will allow 'limited' distribution of either pre-print or published papers (generally means you have to ask the author for a PDF directly), and, with apologies to John Gilmore, the internet interprets copyright as damage and routes around it.
I consider my belief how this particular battle will turn out a good litmus test for my pessimism/optimism.
Some days I can't imagine a future where universal open access is implemented, at other times it seems inevitable. Seeing that I must normally believe it to be a 50/50 thing makes it a great way to calibrate my mood out of my decision making process.
More on topic: I wonder if we'll see countries take a stance in these battles. Why isn't Ecuador Hosting a Sci-Hub Mirror for their citizens? The naive observer might think there is only upsides for countries like these to such an action.
"The Open Access Movement has fought
valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure
their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But
even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future.
Everything up until now will have been lost.
I hope you're OK with a compromise between your pessimism and optimism. I think what you'll see over the next few years is continued movement (with increased velocity) toward open access for well-funded research areas (ie bio and other hard sciences, etc). If you're getting decent grant money from the government or a funding body (like Wellcome Trust or Gates) then your research will be highly likely to be open access, and not just after an embargo period. But in disciplines that aren't well funded it's going to be a different story. Humanities and much of Social Science doesn't have the same funding situation, and so therefore the existing system is going to stick around for quite a while.
The zealots will argue that every service a traditional publisher provides should only cost $20 a paper (or whatever other number you pull form thin air). Except if that was true you'd have a bunch of startups offering compelling publishing services for that price point, which you don't. Vetting and curating scientific literature has real costs, and those who say it doesn't don't have defensible models they can point to to show that it can work without real money flowing. It's always just hand-wavey arguments about theoretical cheap costs.
So I think your optimism will be proven right (or at least more right than wrong) when it comes to well-funded research areas. And your pessimism will be proven right when it comes to fields without the same funding structure.
Didn't the article say the vetting was mostly academics doing it for free? Shouldn't cost much then. Curating can be a paid service as was the case in the article. Whereas, I know what the cost is: SciHub is $5,000/mo to operate if all one does is provide a collection of papers. Distribution to a world-wide audience would cost more but could be absorbed by universities mirroring things and using storage appliances like that OSS one that shows up here periodically. Not to mention cheap boxes that cache the hot docs in RAM.
People that want fancy shit can pay for it. Meanwhile, I got 16,000 papers on IT and INFOSEC out of ACM and IEEE through my university just using a search box with titles, authors, abstracts, and PDF download button. All I need to bring cutting-edge and prior good work to Hacker News regularly. Well, summaries of it unless I find a public download that allows me to share. Esp CiteSeerX, a perfect example of what I'm proposing. It's the bomb. :)
Peer review is done for free yes, but you also need to manage that process and there's a filtering step before you send things to peer review. Then there are checks like someone going through the references and making sure they're all there, that dois are assigned and assigned correctly, etc. There's the software for managing all this process too, and then all the extra cost around hiring people like management, HR, office space, etc.
You can look at all of these and say "yes but that's not hard it's just..." but the fact is someone does work and that'll need to be paid for, so there is some cost.
Often only papers that are accepted actually pay the cost, so they're effectively paying for all the work done on papers that don't make the final cut. Nature, if I remember the figures right, accept about 5% of submissions. So for every paper, there's a certain amount of work that needs to be done on 19 others.
I'm not justifying any particular cost, but it'd be worth looking at PLOS and their fees as they're a non-profit.
> SciHub is $5,000/mo to operate if all one does is provide a collection of papers.
Is it reasonable to put the cost of running a publication at near or under one FTE? You'd at least have to do more if you had search and weren't just piggybacking on google scholar.
"Is it reasonable to put the cost of running a publication at near or under one FTE? You'd at least have to do more if you had search and weren't just piggybacking on google scholar."
Where did you find they're just piggybacking on Google Scholar? I know nothing of the implementation outside what she spends for a specific amount of papers.
"Is it reasonable to put the cost of running a publication at near or under one FTE? You'd at least have to do more if you had search and weren't just piggybacking on google scholar."
Oh yeah, I agree. A survey of many looking at various attributes with associated costs is probably in order to help establish a baseline when predicting costs of larger activities.
Ah search appears to be down, and possibly since Feb. Most news articles talked about them using google scholar and I'm sure I remember using it and it taking me to a google scholar page but with altered hyperlinks. If you search around you'll find other people describing something similar. I assumed it was still like that but apparently google have blocked them [0]
> Oh yeah, I agree. A survey of many looking at various attributes with associated costs is probably in order to help establish a baseline when predicting costs of larger activities.
Yeah it'd be very interesting to know how much something like this might cost. PubMed might be a good analogy, if there was an EU or worldwide version run like that which had proper backups, etc that'd be very interesting.
As another commenter alluded to, the cost to host PDFs is barely a factor in the cost of the whole process. The bulk of the cost is the paid staff and the systems required to run the submission and peer review process. Yes, reviewers review for free. But often there are paid editors and there is always significant staff to handle the submissions, find appropriate reviewers, follow up on the process, and ensure that the whole thing actually gets done, check for plagiarism and fraud, etc. That's not to say it's a particularly good system. The whole process of submission, revise and resubmit, rejection, submit to another journal, etc can take many many months (or even years) and traditional peer review isn't perfect (or even close to it) by any means. But arguing that there are no costs involved is simply false.
If we look at non-profit publishers like PLoS we see processing charges between $1,500 - $3,000 per article. And you have to realize that there are multiple kinds of peer review, at a basic level it breaks down to two categories, what I'll call "methodological review" and "impact review". PLoS One, for example, only does methodological review. So at no point in that process is anyone trying to assess the importance of the paper. eLife is a newer open access publisher going a bit the other way, trying to have a journal selecting for importance of the caliber of Nature, Cell, etc. Their initial costs (these numbers are a few years old) came out to be about $14,000 per article.
Depending on how you approach peer review and what services you are trying to provide you can certainly get the cost down, but I have yet to see a model that can get down below about $700 per article (still only doing methodological review). Sci-Hub can be cheap because it piggy backs on the process after the vetting and curation are done. But that's like comparing apple to oranges.
"Sci-Hub can be cheap because it piggy backs on the process after the vetting and curation are done. But that's like comparing apple to oranges."
Thats actually the most important counter in your post. It's a good point as they do effectively piggyback on the curation process. I think there's still a smaller comparison to be made if we look at the web. All kinds of people post all kinds of stuff. Good stuff eventually makes it into paid or free places that curate it for various communities. Yet, I can access any of these public sites at any time. I can look myself, follow a recommendation made on a forum, go to a free site offering links to good resources, or go to paid site claiming higher quality. Whereas, with main publishers in academia, I have no such options: paid, expensive, and for a long time. Let's get to the costs you describe, though, as it's the meat of your counter.
"If we look at non-profit publishers like PLoS"
Doing that was going to be my proposal as they filter out the fat that comes with management-heavy for-profits. Good you beat me to it.
""methodological review" and "impact review". "
Do you have a link to what goes into methodological review, esp good review, so I can try to assess how to reduce its cost?
"processing charges between $1,500 - $3,000 per article"
That should be easy to cover with non-exhorbitant, subscription models plus some charge to submitting organization. Such articles, after costs recovered, should become free with journal subscription. I think your organization is already doing something like that with one of the startups, though.
"came out to be about $14,000 per article."
This is where publishers won't be able to absorb the costs unless they're charging an arm and a leg. I think the article's recommendation of it coming out of grant money of submitting organization is best one. Want to get prestige? Then review is a cost of doing it. Could be uphill battle but I agree nobody can offer anything free unless such costs are covered externally or with charges for a period of time.
Unlike many journals which attempt to use the peer review process to determine whether or not an article reaches the level of 'importance' required by a given journal, PLOS ONE uses peer review to determine whether a paper is technically sound and worthy of inclusion in the published scientific record.
So basically they've removed any assessment whatsoever about the "importance" of the work, but keep the aspect that assesses for scientific soundness. One note on that is that it allows you to use a broader pool of reviewers. If I'm looking for reviewers to assess the impact of a certain study, I'm going to need potentially very specific people who deeply know the field and how this particular study falls in the context of other noteworthy studies. However, if I only need reviewers to assess scientific soundness I can include a larger pool of reviewers for each paper, since theoretically someone's ability to assess scientific method doesn't require quite the same deep expertise (obviously there's still a good amount of expertise required, just not within the specific micro sub-specialty).
So the theory is that that allows you to do faster peer review and accept more papers because 1) you don't have to be so specific with regard to finding the right reviewers, 2) the review itself is faster because the reviewer can focus purely on methodology, not on importance, and 3) you can accept everything that meets the methodology bar. And remember that the revenue of these types of journals is directly related to how many articles are accepted because it's purely author pays upon acceptance.
But other than those distinctions in general the peer review process is the same as a traditional journal. Typically at least 2 reviewers, and either single-blind (which is the case for PLOS and others like PeerJ) or double-blind. And typically the process can take a few rounds, because the reviewers can reject a paper in its current form but ask for a revision and then re-review the new version.
For me, it's coming down to a fundamental difference or distinction: Those who believe in a zero-sum-gain world, and those who believe in a net-sum-gain world.
I fall into the latter camp. In other words, I believe that by sharing and cooperating, we all can advance.
And, I find myself increasingly thinking and experiencing that the zero-sum-gainers are my opposition. They take as much as they can get away with, and they give as little as they can get away with.
Personal advancement, versus communal.
I can't cooperate with them.
And, I no longer want to engage with them.
I cannot afford to do things that lend or provide them power. For it is only ever turned against me, to leverage further advantage.
Now... for "the community" to come to realize this, and act upon it.
> For me, it's coming down to a fundamental difference or distinction: Those who believe in a zero-sum-gain world, and those who believe in a net-sum-gain world.
I fall into the latter camp. In other words, I believe that by sharing and cooperating, we all can advance.
People like to say this, but they are only okay with sharing things they approve of. By your logic, aren't you morally obligated to let me have something of yours if I ask for it? I'm not criticizing cooperation, just the idealism that falls apart in practice.
The best course of action is a complex blend of the two camps you mentioned.
There is a more fundamental issue - try answering questions about science with a six year old and google. Yes, they can frame their question, yes they can type it into google, yes google provides links. But, click on the links and ads, speedbumps and plain clickbait stop them dead. Very disappointing. Ok you say, put an adblocker on.. well yes but there goes the revenue that keeps many sites online.
First, some of the "knowledge" is deep, that is, has prerequisites, and getting through the prerequisites can use some guidance, help, etc., say, in high school, college, and graduate schools.
Next, finding the material on the Internet, say, 1 trillion or so Web pages, is too often from difficult to much worse. My startup is intended to help with that.
I've developed a new Internet search engine except it's very different from any other search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) and is more for discovery, recommendation, curation, notification, and subscription. Mostly it's for discovery and recommendation.
What Google, etc. do is part of what long ago the field of information retrieval characterized as just part of the problem, the part where the user knows that the content exists, knows they will like the content, and has keywords/phrases that characterize that content. For that part, Google, Bing, etc. work great. But, again, as has been known for decades, that's only part of the problem.
I'm attacking the rest of the problem, that is, where a user knows less about what they want. For that I derived some new mathematics, with some advanced prerequisites, with theorems and proofs, designed the business model, the user interface, the Web pages, the SQL database, the software and server farm architecture and the code, wrote the code, for the production code, 20,000 programming language statements in 80,000 lines of typing. The code is darned fast and appears to run as intended. Currently the code is in alpha test. Then beta test and going live.
Actually, both Sci-Hub and LibGen are mentioned in the article. Perhaps your ctrl+f failed because the page only loads the next section when you scroll down near the bottom of the page.
The charitable view is that this saves bandwidth (and load time) for page views that never get scrolled. Also, it may allow them to count the ads in those sections as impressions without having to paginate the article, which presumably they know that people hate.
But I think it's ironic for an article about open access to make itself essentially unprintable in this way. It's too long for me to read on the screen. A "page of HTML" would be demonstrably superior for that purpose.
Nonfiction and scientific work should be treated differently than fictional works. I don't really care if Mickey Mouse goes into the public domain. But it's crazy that 100 year old scientific works can still be under copyright and illegal to distribute. These objectively have value to society, and the argument for the existence of the public domain is much stronger.
It shouldn't last indefinitely. Maybe only 10 or 15 years. I believe 99% of all works make most of their money in the first few years. Having copyright last a lifetime, let alone much longer, is just crazy.
Put a cost on renewing copyright. This is actually how it used to be. Half way through, you could pay a fee to have copyright extended. Very few people paid this fee (because most works aren't economically valuable), so most works went into public domain much sooner. Journals charge $30 to access obscure ancient papers. But I bet they wouldn't pay even $30 to keep the rights to those same papers.
Don't put everything into copyright by default. And again especially works of nonfiction or scientific papers. If the authors want that, then sure. This wouldn't fix the issues with big journals that demand it. But it still seems like a sensible idea to have copyright opt-in, not opt-out.