Universities spend millions on accessing results of publicly funded research
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
Even the project I worked on when I finished school. We were funded by government grants and our results were intended to be posted publicly, it was written in our proposal. Instead, once we started posting our data online we were told that we were no longer allowed to and our data must now be submitted to a government database. Otherwise we would recieve no more funding.This database of course had access fees that needed to be paid. It felt really shitty to have to lock everything away. I'd worked on an online database and map I was really excited about and it all had to be taken down.
My funding councils want people to publish in open-access journals, but they don't provide extra funds for the doubling of cost that's involved. The money has to come from somewhere, and the main cost item tends to be student stipends, so professors tend to continue publishing in pay-access journals.
I've been on both sides of the "fetch for a friend" process. I've had to ask friends to fetch copies of papers that I've written, for which I've paid page charges, because my university had to drop the journal in one or another waves of cost saving.
And for all this money, the journals do very little in the way of contributing to the process, nowadays. Reviewers work for free, as do most academic editors. Technical editors seem to barely exist anymore, since authors do their own typesetting and journals rely on academic reviewers to help with English.
Academics are caught in a narrowing vice as they move through the career process. Papers have to appear in high-reputation journals, or else. And those journals just happen to be expensive.
Note that asking for an article is not always illegal. For example, authors are often allowed to share the article, and there are often also provisions that allow institutions to "loan" access to each other (inter-library loan), although presumably that would have to go through the institution's librarian.
That said, even if it's illegal, I'd worry about it about as much as worrying about pedestrians skipping the red light on deserted crossings.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/scientific-resea...
I thought the music anti piracy people were bad.
Of course this can happen only when the end user uses the formal interlibrary loan process, instead of alternatives like Sci-Hub (which may be faster and easier).
As with the high subscription prices, the primary mark is not faculty/students but libraries, who are expected to provide the content and constrained from doing anything blatantly illegal to get it.
It’s interesting to note how we got here, and how we remain here. Academics mostly universally complain about the current state of affairs, with reason.
However, we’re here because academics gave up control. Because the journal system, which was originally run by academic volunteers was seen as a hassle and has given over to businesses to run. Slowly, the businesses became to extract more and more profit...
The solution is probably to return to a less profit driven publishing model. But current publishers and academics pretty well locked in.
> the research community uses historical journal reputation to
> evaluate researchers, making it harder for new, better run
> journals to enter the market.
Scientists can't have their cake and eat it too. Either they fund their own research and publish in prestigious expensive journals that cost the public money, or they take public money and make the research available for all.
But it's not easy to migrate to that because scientist aren't just using journals as a publication platform, but as a reputation platform as a function of their exclusivity and reputation.
[1] https://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/General-Informat...
[2] https://wellcome.ac.uk/funding/managing-grant/open-access-po...
[3] https://ec.europa.eu/research/openscience/index.cfm?pg=opena...
That said, funders are also somewhat complicit in it by deciding who to fund based on if they published in those journals. Which is the result of those decisions being made by academics who typically cannot read all the research of all applicants: https://theconversation.com/why-i-disagree-with-nobel-laurea...
In no way can I imagine how blaming scientists for working within the established incentive structure to advance their careers helps advance this issue.
But yeah, it's hard to blame anyone specifically, as the current situation is the result of so many actors: https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarl...
(Apologies for plugging my own article repeatedly, but otherwise I'd be writing the same all the time...)
That said, I also wholly agree that it is foolish to expect change before changing their incentives. Public exposure of the racket that is scientific publishing is one such minor incentive change.
If top researchers refused to publish in or advocate their department pay for closed-access journals, they would die.
If the NSF required NSF funding could not be used to generate work that would be published in closed-access journals, they would die.
If the justice department broke up these journals for the public good or we simply made it impossible for certain IP regulations to apply to scientific research, they would die.
All of these actions require first to acknowledge there is a problem, second to blame corporations running closed-access journals, third to destroy them. You can't skip the second step.
I haven't published in Nature yet, but my group has to fork over thousands per open access article above the usual cost. There is a disincentive to publish open access given that.
The mistake is giving journals a profit incentive in the first place in a system that inherently doesn't work well in a market system. You can't have "competition" between journals, it just doesn't work that way. A handful of journals have high impact factors and so get most of the submissions, that's how it is, and they then can crank up their publishing fees because they can.
Perhaps you shouldn't "blame the publishers" given they are "acting according to their self interest." I did say "If you want to blame anyone[...]," implying I don't really care to blame anyone. I admit I am more inclined to blame the publishers, but the whole system is fundamentally broken.
So that's what I'm doing now [1], and anyone interested can subscribe at [2].
[1] https://medium.com/flockademic/dear-scientists-help-me-help-... [2] https://tinyletter.com/Flockademic
Blaming the person who mugged you at gunpoint is not very useful, he is just acting according to his self interest.
Alternatives are great, but it's ridiculous to reject blaming the people who are responsible for and perpetuate the very bad status quo. They could end it, they just choose not to. We can and should simultaneously advocate to strip them of their power while holding them to account for abusing it.
You are introducing desperation to the scenario, which is totally inappropriate. Unless you know of some publishing house executives who are struggling to put food on the table or homeless?
Also, are you saying you wouldn't blame the mugger?
The editorial boards are usually scientists.
And the folks on the grant committee (at least the government ones) are usually scientists.
As a collective, scientists do have the power to require all publicly funded research be available through open access means.
Even when collectives have power, it is always difficult to exercise it. See for example the limited effect of the Elsevier "boycott": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Knowledge
I agree with avar's comment above - if the government required that publicly-funded research can only be published the open access way, the problem goes away.
It's a prisoner's dilemma: publishing in a closed, high-prestige journal, benefits the researcher but is bad for science. If the government implemented this requirement, though, all researchers would 'instantly' be spared the temptation of 'defecting' by publishing in a closed journal.
There are to risks for scientists here: the risk that their work becomes locked after publishing and their increased difficulty in getting access to other papers, on the one hand.
And the risk that his/her colleague will get ahead by publishing in closed journals, while they waste their careers away with less prestigious open publications, on the other hand.
The status quo is that they are more afraid of each other than the publishers, afraid that their colleague is getting ahead, so they can't prioritize open access. This deadlock needs to be cut from above.
Sometimes it works. For example, the ACM Transactions on Algorithms came into being when the entire editorial board of the (Elsevier) Journal of Algorithms resigned in 2003 in protest against Elsevier. So, it seems the transfer of reputation is possible. This came about after Don Knuth wrote a lengthy letter (linked from [1]) ranting against Elsevier.
It's stunning that apart from isolated cases like this the scientific publishers are still holding on to their ill-gained profits.
[1] http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~hal/jalg.html
Ceterum censeo Elsevier(um) esse delendum.
Of course some scientists derive value from publishing in prestigious journals, but if that's the case they can pay for those fees themselves out of their own pocket, not out of their research grant.
If those journals demand exclusivity, which they often do, the scientists can of course continue to publish in them if they so choose, but then they can also fund their own research.
I'm okay with the public through the government mandating open access, so they have to then pay the open access fees and we'll all be happy to do it.
A better solution, counterintuitive as it sounds, is to increas public funding for more research. If scientists can make a reasonable wage that doesn't force them to pursue tenure by living and dying by the whim of a few top journals, it will be much easier for them to stomach the financial, and possibly career, hit of publishing open source
I wonder how robust the open source movement would be if engineers only made $45k / year
And that is already a lot of money. More money than I can think of spending and enough money to let me save 50% of my paycheque.
So excuse us for making 'barely anything above minimum wage'
Not trying to knock anyone or be condescending. The point is that like 90%+ of biology or chem phds make less than $60k. That is not true of engineers, not by a long shot. There was a recent nytimes article comparing grad student degreees awarded in various fields to jobs in that field. There were more jobs than degrees in comp sci. For life sciences, there were like 115,000 advanced degrees and like 10k jobs
Some funding already comes with the requirement to publish open access.
https://intranet.birmingham.ac.uk/as/libraryservices/library...
What do you imagine is going to happen? That public support of science is going to drop to zero because funding bodies forgot to update two of their internal rules, and instead just updated one, thereby creating a dependency relationship that was impossible to satisfy?
I think this is a case where if you fix the incentives then the behavior changes. I think by default scientists want to discover things and collaborate - if there was a way to cause this behavior to lead to additional reputation and funding (similar to how open source software participation increases reputation) that would go a long way.
It'd be cool if hypothesis, experiment design, results, data, and papers were shared and available for open access.
An interesting historical example of this was an early breakthrough in interpreting genetic code by Marshall Nirenberg and Heinrich Matthaei [1], both of whom were considered unremarkable and largely ignored by more established geneticists at the time of their discovery, who were fixated on finding a hypothetical "delimiter" between genetic instructions coded in DNA.
This, however, is a digression for another day.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirenberg_and_Matthaei_experim...
I don't think this would work because pre-publication work is usually not a secret, it gets promoted at conferences and seminars well before it's formally published.
That probably won't be something I'll have any hand in implementing though :)
It's bad for science, which is bad for all of us.
The former is a more expansive category than the latter. This is something which is true for all academics.
I think the likely explanation is that we're on a tech forum with a decisively scientistic outlook, and in which most of the people here have a scientific background. And of course 'people mean academics when they say scientists', but that's the point - we shouldn't sublate all academic work into the sciences.
The first is not necessary (although still not that implausible to me) - non-native speakers also influence native speakers.
But yes, your final paragraph is definitely true too. Although I think in the comment you responded to, you can equate them.
How can you equate them? I don't see it personally. Science is defined by the scientific method. Most of the humanities do not use the scientific method most of the time (history, philosophy, sociology, English, etc.)
I guess :) (Note also that you don't need to be based in the sciences - you can also just not be in academia.)
I can equate them in this context because OP said:
> Scientists can't have their cake and eat it too. Either they fund their own research and publish in prestigious expensive journals that cost the public money, or they take public money and make the research available for all.
The same holds true for those in the humanities, right?
this will make you cringe
Perhaps something like this could work under certain limited circumstances... but I'm skeptical.
Could offer incentives for people to convince their co-workers to quit en-masse (i.e., bonus payouts for getting many employees to quit an once)...
Besides, if the positions pay well there will be plenty of other candidates willing step in. There is no shortage of examples showing that morals are often secondary to money.
Some ways this could play out would be:
a) Found a startup that does $immoral_thing, wait for "payouts for everyone" to start rolling in.
b) Like (a), but just invent fake employees and give them a linkedin and some social media profile.
c) As an employee, keep joining immoral enterprises. I get a payday every time! So sort of a reverse incentive actually.
But I also know nothing about running a journal. Can someone explain the cost structure of an academic journal, and why a model like publishing fees wouldn't work?
The schools are relatively cost insensitive as long as the journal is high impact.
Researchers will always be highly cost sensitive.
Look at arxiv.org, that papers there are made purely by academics from start to finish and are already publication grade (if not better).
(That said, typesetting and writing are more and more often offloaded to academics, but there's also things like e.g. making HTML versions and system-readable versions [1] available, which is a cumbersome manual process.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_for_Metadata_Harvesti...
So yes, peer review is useful, but it also often happens after publication at arXiv, outside of the journal submission.
The editor would still pick reviewers based on reputation, they'd just get a lump sum along with the work.
Paying the reviewer doesn't incentivise them to accept or reject only to actually do the review. As it stands, in many fields reviewers are far from experts in the area they're reviewing but only in the same general discipline. Papers sail through review without proper statistical oversight, because what statistics expert is going to spend their time reviewing psych or bio articles when that's not their discipline?
Well if we paid people to do what amounts to some of the most important work in science, maybe we'd get actual experts to do it!
No one suggests that paying programmers to program results in shoddier work. There just needs to be an accountability and feedback system just like in any other industry.
The problem is that this keeps the barrier to participate high - instead of paying to read research, you're paying to publish it.
Now, this isn't necessarily a problem: research costs money, and publishing that research is just part of that. However, the prices are widely considered disproportionate: ranging from $3000 to $5000 per article in the traditional journals (that researchers feel obliged to publish in because that helps their careers), with profit margins of 30% to 40% (comparable to Apple's, which sells luxury products).
Considering how technology has drastically lowered the prices of most other types of media publishing, it's suspicious that prices of academic articles have only risen.
There's a huge movement to improve this situation, but it's a pretty difficult market with many different actors with different incentives. I've written some about why it is difficult to change this at [1].
[1] https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarl...
edit: Downvote if you want, but it is true, maybe not at every institution, but some Latin American countries the budget for access to the literature is greater than what they spend on supporting basic research [0].
0. https://www.slideshare.net/biodiego88/force2017-ppt-diegogom...
In less well off developing countries, you are absolutely and completely correct in every way, shape, form, and manner. The cost for access to literature can be greater than that of the salaries a department pays its basic research faculty.
Thankfully there is lib-gen and sci-hub. Sadly, the United States is trying to force developing countries to support copyright measures that will lock us out if we adopt them.
(And of course, any questions and remarks are welcome!)
[1] https://medium.com/flockademic/dear-scientists-help-me-help-...
That said, they do definitely feel the pressure as well, given their moving in the direction of a research analytics company rather than a publisher.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/dramatic-statement-e...
https://ec.europa.eu/research/openscience/index.cfm?pg=opena...
https://www.projekt-deal.de/about-deal/
Of course in the US with basically unlimited student loan money, no one seems to be in a particular hurry to cut costs.
Well... https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-univ...
[1] https://medium.com/flockademic/these-trailblazers-are-paving...
[2] https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarl...
After doing a quick search here's some info I found about U.S. federal funding for research: https://scholcomm.columbia.edu/open-access/public-access-man...
I'm not in the research business, but available after 1 year sounds reasonable to me. I can see the cost in vetting and distributing and how certain businesses and universities would pay a premium for quicker access.
The research in these journals isn't funded by the journals, and researchers aren't payed royalties for people reading these journals (I assume they don't get paid by the journal at all).
So why are these journals so expensive to access? Is it all just a rort?
[1] https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarl... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...
They're no idiot. Do you think these guys have been asleep at the wheel for the past 6 years, oblivious to the Open Access debate and the general sentiment?
When it comes to Open Access, the new distribution and sales channels have already been accounted for, new policies (and policy makers) worked out. Open Access will be the second coming of Christ for that industry, a new golden goose.
Universities pay publishing companies millions to access the results of research their employees performed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Chemical_Society#Cont...
Why do people publish papers. Is it to get acknowledged for the work? Is it a requirement for getting PhD? Or is it so that world could benefit from the research?
Also, can someone simply use a paper, copy that idea to make a product, and make money out of it, without giving anything back to the researchers?
If researchers publish out of necessity or to get acknowledged or so that the "world knows", can't they just put it on Arxiv? Why spend money on costly journals?
All three of those are correct.
> Also, can someone simply use a paper, copy that idea to make a product, and make money out of it, without giving anything back to the researchers?
Yes, although it's usually not that simple. The focus of research is usually more fundamental in nature, that only leads to products far down the road.
But note that the researchers are funded using public money, so if there was anything to give back, it would be to the public (which sort of happens through new companies).
> If researchers publish out of necessity or to get acknowledged or so that the "world knows", can't they just put it on Arxiv? Why spend money on costly journals?
"Acknowledgement" goes beyond that - it needs to be considered good in order to qualify for further academic positions. See https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that-ca...
The quality of peer-review at conferences for example is terrible, and that is well known. Even at not very big conferences, and despite the usually hard work of the organizers.
So establishing a good review process is not easy and perhaps that is what is stopping the open access model rather than just the prestige issue mentioned in other comments.
Add to that that the majority of papers in many disciplines receive virtually zero statistical oversight from an actual statistical expert, and... well... you begin to wonder what service the existing journals are actually adding. Marketing and sales?
[4] https://cos.io/
For [3], the actual platforms produced by Coko and its affiliates are more readily discovered here: https://pubsweet.org/ http://substance.io/
Hadn't heard of [2] before- looks neat.
We have [1] currently deployed for a couple of websites where I currently work. We've found it to be a bit of a pain and are trying to phase it out to some degree. It's basically a layer on top of WordPress to the best of my understanding (I haven't dealt too much with it).
Your final point is probably correct, but I'd add that when it comes to wanting to take publishing out of the hands of the established publishers, having to run software yourself is going to be painful anyway (though hopefully not as painful as OJS, which has quite a history already).
http://www.theoj.org/ https://plos.github.io/ambraproject/index.html https://v4.pubpub.org/
Edit: And theoj doesn't really appear to be maintained anymore either...
The article mentions the discontinuation of Aperta but nothing about Ambra?
Otherwise, if you ran a Journal, how would you setup a free system to curate high-impact research? Or alternatively, how much would you charge to run such a journal?
That they want to have a job in research, which are really, really scarce. I explained this in more detail at https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that-ca...
> Otherwise, if you ran a Journal, how would you setup a free system to curate high-impact research? Or alternatively, how much would you charge to run such a journal?
If you run a journal, you're most likely one of the big publishers that is profiting heavily from the status quo.
Much of the actual academic work (finding reviewers, etc.) is done by actual academics (mostly for free), but the rest of it, including promoting it to potential readers, is done by the publishers. (There have been some success stories of editorial boards leaving the publishers' journals to start their own, e.g. Glossa (formerly Lingua), but those are few and far between.
Someone has to pay for expenses associated with maintaining these platforms. Right now its either the tax payers or college students who pay for it indirectly, when their institution buys library access.
We don't care about their problems, their employees should go find another job which isn't so predatory and leaching off public programs and funding.
Nobody has to pay, a better alternative is for these publishers to cease to exist.
If you can't or don't want to do that, please just don't post until you can and do.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/apr/22/academic-... https://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/31858... http://thecostofknowledge.com/