Frankly, scientific publishers represent institutionalised theft of tax payer money:
- Academics (most often publicly funded via grants and university salaries) do the work for free.
- They are expected to learn to use LaTeX and to typeset their work for free.
- They are expected to copy-edit the papers for free, or else pay a copy editor themselves with, you guessed it, public funds.
- Volunteer Academics (on university time and therefore, again, public money) are expected to review the work for technical accuracy and novelty. If done well this is extremely time consuming.
- Finally, the Journals have the temerity to charge the same universities who produce their product millions of pounds a year in journal subscriptions and Open Access fees.
- Finally finally, none of the Authors are ever paid for their work. Not that it matters, because again: public funding should mean public access.
The most frustrating part is that Academics themselves are locked into this system by the career prospects conferred by prestigious journals/conferences.
I’m not normally one for beating the “nationalise them” drum, but if there has ever been a case for businesses to be dismantled and put in public hands it’s these parasites.
I agree, though a simpler solution than nationalization would be to legalize what Sci-Hub is already doing. It shouldn't be illegal to post a PDF on my website when the author wants it to be read freely and isn't going to to get paid for it anyway.
better yet, just abolish copyright and replace it with some automatic compensation system for the original author.
i don't know if "society" would exactly be better off if 100 film studios were all competing to make the best avengers movie, but it would certainly be good for creativity.
That's a serious argumentative leap to make. Do you really think that's the best solution for this case, or do you maybe have a pre-existing position on this issue which you believe this instance supports? The easiest option is likely to pass a law that publicly-funded research is publicly accessible.
> automatic compensation system
Could you detail this a little further? I'm not sure exactly for what you are advocating.
I think researchgate does that with a social network for scientists. I think if scientists can maintain a personal site (or use their lab site) and put the papers there you can mostly find them with google scholar. Researchgate works as well if you don't want to maintain a personal site. I'm not affiliated with researchgate in anyway but have posted by papers and thesis there which can be accessed via google scholar.
If it's in an academic's employment contract that they don't get to keep the rights to their academic papers it means 1) they already got paid and 2) they can't give away work that they already sold.
Points 2 and 3 heavily depend on the field you’re in. I’m currently in the medical field and not a single MD here has ever heard of or used LaTeX, type-setting is all done by the journals. The rest of your argument is of course spot on!
The most ironic part of the current system was once having to use sci-hub to download my own paper, as we didn’t have a subscription to the specific journal...
All the issues you raise are only slightly problematic. If scientists need to typeset their own research papers or volunteer for peer review are minor compared to the real problem that people can't read tax payer funded research.
> - Finally, the Journals have the temerity to charge the same universities who produce their product millions of pounds a year in journal subscriptions and Open Access fees.
Yes, this is about universities. But the same paywalls affect regular people as well.
It is absolutely rediculus that publishing a paper costs more than I earn a month as a scientist.
> - Academics (most often publicly funded via grants and university salaries) do the work for free.
This means the public is paying the academic to do the work, they're not doing it for free. Grants do come with the expectation of results.
> - Finally finally, none of the Authors are ever paid for their work.
> The most frustrating part is that Academics themselves are locked into this system by the career prospects conferred by prestigious journals/conferences.
Just to be clear this doesn't mean scientists are unpaid, it means they're being paid in career prospects. (Edit: they're also paid in their salaries which include the expectation of work.) (And part of the journals' service is helping academia determine who the best scientists are. That's an important service if done correctly and deserves payment just like any other work.)
As with many scientific problems a good problem statement can make all the difference. It sounds like what you want is a different form of payment?
It's unclear how much of your problem with the academic system stems from its already nationalized aspects, how much comes from its non-nationalized aspects, and how much comes from it being partially nationalized. Until you can answer that question you might hold off on the "more nationalization" drum.
OP's point stands: the results of publicly funded work should be publicly available.
> part of the journals' service is helping academia determine who the best scientists are
Could you elaborate? If you're referring to the revered and important process of peer review, isn't that explicitly and exclusively performed by other scientists, paid mostly in public funding?
The idea is that a good publishing record gives one better career prospects. By accepting and rejecting papers journals are giving a signal used by academia in their hiring and promotion decisions.
If you're an administrator overseeing a scientific department your skills are probably in administration, not chemistry or physics or what have you. What you would really like is for a team of top chemists to tell you who the best chemists among your staff or hiring prospects are. That level of consulting would be cost prohibitive but the journals are providing a similar service that is apparently being exchanged for exclusive publishing rights.
There is already arxiv.org and biorxiv.org (and probably some more that I am not aware of) and they are gaining poplarity (some fields are faster in adoption than others).
These prerint-servers are great for publishing your papers as-is, without peer review. But scientfic standards also require people to let other independent researchers do a peer-review where they criticise your paper and then ask for further experiments/analyses/elaborations/corrections to strengthen the point you want to make with your paper. Traditional journals are usually pretty good at fetching people to do the (gratis) peer review for them. As far as I know something like this does not exist for papers on preprint servers. But at least you can leave comments under the preprints and thereby offer criticism or ask questions.
> But scientfic standards also require people to let other independent researchers do a peer-review where they criticise your paper and then ask for further experiments/analyses/elaborations/corrections to strengthen the point you want to make with your paper.
I'm not sure how familiar you are with open source software, but this is literally what happens with code review and pull requests in open source. Before code is accepted into the master branch, project maintainers review and test submissions. I don't see why a community couldn't be built that democratizes that review process even further. At risk of ridicule, I wonder if blockchain could be used to determine consensus "accepted" science.
- Academics (most often publicly funded via grants and university salaries) do the work for free.
- They are expected to learn to use LaTeX and to typeset their work for free.
- They are expected to copy-edit the papers for free, or else pay a copy editor themselves with, you guessed it, public funds.
- Volunteer Academics (on university time and therefore, again, public money) are expected to review the work for technical accuracy and novelty. If done well this is extremely time consuming.
- Finally, the Journals have the temerity to charge the same universities who produce their product millions of pounds a year in journal subscriptions and Open Access fees.
- Finally finally, none of the Authors are ever paid for their work. Not that it matters, because again: public funding should mean public access.
The most frustrating part is that Academics themselves are locked into this system by the career prospects conferred by prestigious journals/conferences.
I’m not normally one for beating the “nationalise them” drum, but if there has ever been a case for businesses to be dismantled and put in public hands it’s these parasites.
Sincerely, a Scientist :-)