> From January 2021, authors submitting primary research articles* to Nature will be able to choose to publish their work using either the traditional publishing route OR Open Access.
> *Non-primary research (e.g. Reviews, Comments, News & Views) is not eligible for Open Access and is only published using the traditional publishing route.
https://www.nature.com/nature/our-publishing-models
> The APC to publish Open Access in Nature is €9,500
https://www.nature.com/nature/for-authors/publishing-options
You publish in an established venue, but also put the paper on a public website. This is possible legally using the "standard trick": https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/119002/7319
... and is in relatively wide practice.
The other OA journals still cost money that needs to be budgeted, i. e. not something you would pay out of your pocket. For example PLOS One charges you $ 1749. I guess the prices for publishing the articles may actually converge on a fair price for the reputation associated with the journal.
Whereas in Sweden for example, a violent rapist was awarded ~$84k - https://www.gp.se/ledare/v%C3%A5ldt%C3%A4ktsmannens-skadest%... - after he turned out to be a minor but had been tried as an adult, and in the end spent less than 2 years in prison.
Some of ThePirateBay founders had longer sentences, absolute clown world.
(«free for the author but kept behind a paywall, or the author pays up front»)
So rather than a reviewer lending their reputation to a journal, and that journal then conferring a stamp of trustworthiness onto an academic work, reviewers lend their reputation directly to the works they review. The works themselves can still be shared far and wide, e.g. via ArXiv.
Of course, inertia is still a massive force to work against.
Your proposed solution will not work because the sibling journal doesn't have the same paid support staff to do the unpleasant work that academics do not want to do. The unpleasant work includes administrative, first pass screening, copy-editing, typesetting, etc. I wrote a previous comment about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16738497
Therefore, the zero cost sibling journal wouldn't even get started by (most) academic editors because it imposes more labor they don't want to do. Yes, publishers like Elsevier and Springer are vilified ... but they also have paid staff and infrastructure to support the papers editors.
Because internet discussions have the constant repetition of "the reviewers are unpaid" (which is true), it creates a distorted mental model that the prestigious journals have "no paid staff" (which is not true). The publishers' paid support employees helps the unpaid reviewers.
An interesting journal that might seem like a counterexample to the support staff labor puzzle above is JMLR. But in an essay that explains how JMLR is able to function (e.g. offload typesetting and out-of-pocket expense of copy-editing to the submitter instead of the publisher) ... that same essay also explains why other journals haven't copied JMLR's model. (Analogous to your "sibling journal" proposal.)
Excerpt from https://blogs.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-j... :
>Does JMLR’s success and efficiency mean that all journals could run this way? Of course not. First, computer science journals are in a particularly good situation for being operated at low cost. Computer scientists possess all of the technological expertise required to efficiently manage and operate an online journal. Journal publishing is an information industry and computer scientists are specialists in information processing. Second, the level of volunteerism that JMLR relies on is atypical for the entire spectrum of journals.
Thus, the academics and editors at non-compsci journals such as Nature and The Lancet do not have comparable culture of information systems platform management, computer software skills of typesetting, volunteerism, etc that JMLR has. And the key is that they have no incentive to do so since the publishers already give them infrastructure support without imposing extra labor on the editors.
See for example https://www.elsevier.com/authors/submit-your-paper/sharing-a...:
You can always post your preprint on a preprint server. Additionally, for ArXiv and RePEC you can also immediately update this version with your accepted manuscript. Please note that Cell Press, The Lancet, and some society-owned titles have different preprint policies. Information on these is available on the journal homepage.
[…]
You can post your accepted author manuscript immediately to an institutional repository and make this publicly available after an embargo period has expired. Remember that for gold open access articles, you can post your published journal article and immediately make it publicly available.”
Rankings exist; a widespread one is the Press Freedom Index from Reporters Without Borders. If you check the 2021 ratings on the map¹, you will see that excellence is reserved to a few countries only - CostaRica, Portugal and Ireland fare better than the UK, France, Germany, the USA and Australia.
With "receiving public funding yet not reaching thresholds of quality for public use" it was meant that if the news organization receives public funding, its quality should reach some level well above that of an agency financially left to its own devices, and its quality should justify public investment. An entity receiving public funding is supposed to respond about its use - practices, outcomes etc.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Press_freedom_2021.svg
--
Now: the poster seemed to indicate a relation between "market" (number of buyers) and quality. The idea that information, commentary, analysis and research results and validation can be made akin to a "deregulated and for profit industry" (e.g. the music industry) is perplexing. Bread and water - privatized or not - must be accessible and not toxic, as part of societal organization. Less buyers' funding does not imply quality decrease, and free access to vital parts of knowledge is public concern.
It seems no.
- No one service or site or subscription or pass
- No reasonable fee
- No aggregation of all the research
They’ve externalized the useful work back onto the user. Sci-hub does that work for me.
If I could pay $100/month* for sci-hub, I would.
* Footnote: Arbitrarily rating it as 3x more value than, say, Bloomberg. And while I think it should be a public service rather than a fee, if there is a fee, it likely should be geo-adjusted by global income bands: https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/4085814679889422...
For example, the status quo can be justified by "it seems obvious that" rather than being evidence-based. In practice, single or double blind is very often not actually blind [1], in which case it's hard to argue that it would be any different than transparency. Likewise, a new solution "creates all kinds of conflicts of interests and biases", without even considering whether the existing CoIs and biases are any better. Likewise, if people who game the system today have a low reputation, why would the same not hold true in a new system? Likewise, does anonymous peer review actually improve the quality of the reviews (e.g. [2])?
It's good not to blindly embrace something new, but I think it's important to withold judgement too, and see how it plays out in practice, and to make an effort to compensate for the prejudice people typically have towards the status quo.
And yes, absolutely agreed that much more needs to be addressed to improve science. But I also very much take issue with the idea that peer review is fine as-is.
[1] https://absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2017/10/31/the-fractured-lo...
[2] Heading "quality of feedback": https://plos.org/resource/open-peer-review/
As an example of a topical search with no login:
https://www.deepdyve.com/search?query=COVID-19
Another search:
https://www.deepdyve.com/search?author=Doyle%2C+W.+T.
And a page from that search:
https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/american-association-of-physics-...
You get only one page when not logged in, but Deepdyve has all of American Journal of Physics, which is really nice.
Deepdyve has been submitted several times to HN over the past decade, but it never generates any interest. That's surprising, considering the interest in SciHub.
You can't read the full text w/o signing up for the free trial. Without registering, you can't bookmark articles or add them to folders, either.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
At the end, the article says:
But it is still worth contemplating a world without Sci-Hub—that is to say, a world in which Sci-Hub would be unnecessary. The “effective nationalization” proposed by Wiley and by the academic publishers themselves might just pave the way there.
It is quite frustrating that the Scientific Community producing the Intellectual Property that the "Academic Publishing Industry" makes money out of, is not doing more to bring the "Cartel" down once and for all. Have they become so pusillanimous that they are no longer willing to stand-up against what is clearly unethical and wrong?
It is time to re-read The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_on_Voluntary_Servitu...) and ACT on it.
