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Scientific publishing is a ripoff - we fund research - it should be free (alt views)

#1
C C Offline
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...d-research

EXCERPT: Never underestimate the power of one determined person. What Carole Cadwalladr has done to Facebook and big data, and Edward Snowden has done to the state security complex, the young Kazakhstani scientist Alexandra Elbakyan has done to the multibillion-dollar industry that traps knowledge behind paywalls. Sci-Hub, her pirate web scraper service, has done more than any government to tackle one of the biggest rip-offs of the modern era: the capture of publicly funded research that should belong to us all. Everyone should be free to learn; knowledge should be disseminated as widely as possible. No one would publicly disagree with these sentiments. Yet governments and universities have allowed the big academic publishers to deny these rights. Academic publishing might sound like an obscure and fusty affair, but it uses one of the most ruthless and profitable business models of any industry.

The model was pioneered by the notorious conman Robert Maxwell. He realised that, because scientists need to be informed about all significant developments in their field, every journal that publishes academic papers can establish a monopoly and charge outrageous fees for the transmission of knowledge. He called his discovery “a perpetual financing machine”. He also realised that he could capture other people’s labour and resources for nothing. Governments funded the research published by his company, Pergamon, while scientists wrote the articles, reviewed them and edited the journalsfor free. His business model relied on the enclosure of common and public resources. Or, to use the technical term, daylight robbery.

As his other ventures ran into trouble, he sold his company to the Dutch publishing giant Elsevier. Like its major rivals, it has sustained the model to this day, and continues to make spectacular profits. Half the world’s research is published by five companies: Reed Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Wiley-Blackwell and the American Chemical Society. Libraries must pay a fortune for their bundled journals, while those outside the university system are asked to pay $20, $30, sometimes $50 to read a single article.

While open-access journals have grown rapidly, researchers still have to read the paywalled articles in commercial journals. And, because their work is assessed by those who might fund, reward or promote them according to the impact of the journals in which they publish, many feel they have no choice but to surrender their research to these companies. Science ministers come and go without saying a word about this rip-off....

MORE: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...d-research
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#2
Secular Sanity Offline
That’s really interesting. I didn’t realize the extent of it. Lots and lots of controversy.

Quote:The way to make money from a scientific article looks very similar, except that scientific publishers manage to duck most of the actual costs. Scientists create work under their own direction – funded largely by governments – and give it to publishers for free; the publisher pays scientific editors who judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar, but the bulk of the editorial burden – checking the scientific validity and evaluating the experiments, a process known as peer review – is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis. The publishers then sell the product back to government-funded institutional and university libraries, to be read by scientists – who, in a collective sense, created the product in the first place.

Good business model, though, but I think they’re right, it should be a public scandal. I wonder if the boycott was successful.

I can usually find free access one way or another but some are almost impossible.  One guy at the old place used to give me copies of ones he had purchased. He was one that every considered a crank but he was their favorite.  I’m blanking on his name, though. I think he was from the UK and was on a goofy TV show once talking about his discoveries. C2 would remember. You might, too. He was on all the forums. That was way before open access was even a thing. I’ve only purchased one before. I think it was under fifty bucks but I was sorely disappointed. There was nothing to it. Nothing of value.

Edit: Farsight...that's who it was.
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#3
C C Offline
(Sep 19, 2018 10:23 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote: . . . Good business model, though, but I think they’re right, it should be a public scandal. I wonder if the boycott was successful.


No new tweets since Dec 2016? One of them announced that scores of German libraries were going the alternative route of providing papers via the proxy pirating of Library Genesis, Sci-Hub, etc. Seems quasi-cannibilistic since that ultimately depends upon building up a stash via the credentials of educational institutions which do surrender and pay the science publishing racket. Maybe they're also supplementing with "traditional" peer-exchange slash BitTorrent bucaneering as well, but that would sound even more Jesse James for mainstream book-journal-manuscript-bundle depositories.

Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science? (2017): Scientists are well aware that they seem to be getting a bad deal. The publishing business is “perverse and needless”, the Berkeley biologist Michael Eisen wrote in a 2003 article for the Guardian, declaring that it “should be a public scandal”. Adrian Sutton, a physicist at Imperial College, told me that scientists “are all slaves to publishers. What other industry receives its raw materials from its customers, gets those same customers to carry out the quality control of those materials, and then sells the same materials back to the customers at a vastly inflated price?” (A representative of RELX Group, the official name of Elsevier since 2015, told me that it and other publishers “serve the research community by doing things that they need that they either cannot, or do not do on their own, and charge a fair price for that service”.)

Many scientists also believe that the publishing industry exerts too much influence over what scientists choose to study, which is ultimately bad for science itself. Journals prize new and spectacular results – after all, they are in the business of selling subscriptions – and scientists, knowing exactly what kind of work gets published, align their submissions accordingly. This produces a steady stream of papers, the importance of which is immediately apparent. But it also means that scientists do not have an accurate map of their field of inquiry. Researchers may end up inadvertently exploring dead ends that their fellow scientists have already run up against, solely because the information about previous failures has never been given space in the pages of the relevant scientific publications. A 2013 study, for example, reported that half of all clinical trials in the US are never published in a journal.

According to critics, the journal system actually holds back scientific progress. In a 2008 essay, Dr Neal Young of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which funds and conducts medical research for the US government, argued that, given the importance of scientific innovation to society, “there is a moral imperative to reconsider how scientific data are judged and disseminated”.

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#5
Secular Sanity Offline
(Sep 21, 2018 03:47 AM)C C Wrote: RELATED: https://www.scivillage.com/thread-6176-p...l#pid23511

I guess you would have to assume that there was a little behind the scenes incentive. Interesting. We are living in a knowledge economy. Collaborating is extremely important in science but you don’t want to get cut out completely like Rosalind. Watson looks a little shady when explaining his double helix discovery, doesn’t he? Her sister denied that she had Asperger’s syndrome and it does sound like he was snooping in her office. She probably wasn’t invited back to Oxford because she didn’t play golf.
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