Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure a ‘Pirate Bay of Science’ Never Goes Down

Arcygenical said:
Only $89 for 24 hours access. C'mon. I'm not entirely against paying for credible research but that's ridiculous.
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The problem is that the cost is associated with how often anyone would access that, most scientific papers are only going to be read maybe 100 times in their lifetime. That's nothing like a book. Its the same reason niche text books go for a ton of money.
Think of it exactly like software or video games. If you want to have niche software it might cost $10000 for a 1 year license, but if you want to have something way more robust like Microsoft windows its only going to be $100 when millions of people are paying even though a ton more money is spent developing it. So the cost associated with it from an input standpoint is actually incredibly cheap.

The main argument against paid articles is the fact that the majority of this research is funded by governments in developed nations. And in that sense the tax payers did indeed pay for the research, and writing of the articles and therefor should have access to it. The journals even ask people to peer review it and typically do not pay them for their time and that means the government or some university is actually footing the bill for the peer review. The only thing the journal itself does is accept or reject, and then publish and do some editing. But at the end of the day that still costs money to do and someone has to pay for it. All this is very unlikely to ever change because big powerful players have a vested interest in keeping the system as it is. For instance a large University can afford to foot millions of dollars in bills to buy unlimited access to huge libraries of journals and they have the power to negotiate decent rates for that. So for them keeping the system as is, is a good thing, it helps their researchers and restricts researchers at smaller colleges or small startups. And this feeds back into a new problem, all over the USA even companies are starting to figure out that everything can be done cheaper in a university due to their rates, so why bother doing research at a company? Just outsource it to whatever labs at a university do something similar. You get a price break on the supplies, the equipment, the information, and the labor, that's part of why the USA and other places are now pumping out way to many graduate students for the number of jobs, because school has become a loophole to getting to cheap extremely educated and hard working labor.
 
We had a meeting today, basically to reassure people they would be employed after Christmas....
Retronym said:
We were just briefed that the white house is planning an executive order to do away with embargo periods if research is federally funded.
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FWIW
Some of the points at today’s meeting...

The authors will have to spend more of their money for ‘open access’ fees that the journals will be forced to charge.

Right now we get most of our money from university libraries. When this economic model dries up, publishing articles will come with an open access fee to authors. And of course individual subscribers to the journals will have to make up the library subscription revenue.

When authors are charged this fee, it leaves less money for the actual research.

We make all content open access after 1 year. In the hopes of having subscribers when new typeset content is posted after PubMed.

Either the executive order will close that gap or eliminate it entirely.

one option multiple societies may consider is a lawsuit.

The hope is a grace period happens, otherwise this is a spinning plates situation.

A lot of people, including society members (subscribers) think this will mean lower costs, but the opposite is more likely.

Less research, and higher subscriber fees.

At least that is our management’s view.

We were on a five year track to migrate to OA, now it may be one or two.

My personal thinking is that if the EO only addresses federally funded material, then ‘their money, their rules’.

There are Euro donors pushing for it but that is too complicated to get into here. And I only have a vague understanding of it.
 
rudy said:
And this feeds back into a new problem, all over the USA even companies are starting to figure out that everything can be done cheaper in a university due to their rates, so why bother doing research at a company? Just outsource it to whatever labs at a university do something similar. You get a price break on the supplies, the equipment, the information, and the labor, that's part of why the USA and other places are now pumping out way to many graduate students for the number of jobs, because school has become a loophole to getting to cheap extremely educated and hard working labor.
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I assume we'll continue to see a trend toward increased research compensation at universities as a result.

And honestly, I don't see this as that bad of a thing. Government funded research comes with the collateral of the knowledge gained being close to the learning pipeline, and corporations moving to the same model produces a similar result. Plenty of stuff will be locked under NDAs, for sure, but the sheer proximity of the research to the students is bound to provide a boost to education.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
I assume we'll continue to see a trend toward increased research compensation at universities as a result.

And honestly, I don't see this as that bad of a thing. Government funded research comes with the collateral of the knowledge gained being close to the learning pipeline, and corporations moving to the same model produces a similar result. Plenty of stuff will be locked under NDAs, for sure, but the sheer proximity of the research to the students is bound to provide a boost to education.
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Its hella bad for people, we already over produce highly educated people, now we want the ones that do make it stuck at university salaries and the others just pushed out if the system once they are not a cheap grad student or post doc?
 
rudy said:
Its hella bad for people, we already over produce highly educated people, now we want the ones that do make it stuck at university salaries and the others just pushed out if the system once they are not a cheap grad student or post doc?
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Nah, I'm thinking more of postdocs getting progressive salary upgrades and quality, industry relevant education being pushed further down to the undergrad level and so on.

Obviously there will be a range of possibilities, but one that strikes me as interesting is the possibility of organizations competing for research time at productive institutions, thus driving up compensation.
 
Derfnofred said:
When I was at the University of California for my Ph.D, we had access to almost everything (although I know the med students had access to some medical journals I didn't, but that was a rare occurrence); I linked above that UC system isn't playing with Elsevier to the same level as it was, so the times, they are a changin'.
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I work at a university for almost 15 years now, and I can tell that any goodwill towards the academic publishers has been wiped out with the price hikes in recent years. They have gone too far with that, and are seen as moneygrabbers trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of the publications, with no regard to those who author or read them. The article's Cory Doctorow quote about science funders declaring war on the publishers is very true. Rather than funding the profits of the publishers, academic institutions around the world are now figuring out how they can put that money towards better uses.

Do note that it is not only academic publishers who are seen as vile now. A very similar trend is observed in other areas like school textbooks, where Open Educational Resources attempt to wrestle the monopoly on school textbooks away from traditional publishers. Unsurprisingly, the publishers won't go down without a fight, and have resorted to many of the same tactics that we are seeing today against Open Access.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
Nah, I'm thinking more of postdocs getting progressive salary upgrades and quality, industry relevant education being pushed further down to the undergrad level and so on.

Obviously there will be a range of possibilities, but one that strikes me as interesting is the possibility of organizations competing for research time at productive institutions, thus driving up compensation.
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That's a pretty optimistic view. But it doesn't really jive with what I have seen or would expect. For instance, part of the reason academics can get good rates on supplies is that there is an expectation at all levels that businesses will pay more for them. Its worth something to get lab labor to get used to your reagents and supplies so they want to use them in other places as well as being able claim you are supporting them. So if business clients stop purchasing in favor of outsourcing to academics then what has to happen is those companies need to increase their cost to academics. All that I have seen in all of this is that as time progresses they finder more ways to avoid paying people an appropriate salary. Many universities already have rules about postdocs that force people to upgrade them to technicians or other positions if they are there too long. So they just push them out to a new place and find a cheaper replacement.
 
That is excellent. They've always been very education-friendly with their licensing model and this really kicks things up a few notches. Good for Epic.
 
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