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Comment by hyperion2010 | Hacker News Reader

hyperion2010·

Something on the order of 50% of all research funding goes to the academic publishing industry.

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...

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For such a strong statement as that, some context is critical. Many readers are doing mental math based on American pay rates, and concluding that this can't possibly be true. Indeed, the access cost cited won't be anything even slightly approaching 50% in a first world context.

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.

I am charged with the task of returning a university that used to be a research school before the Khmer Rouge to be a national research university. Professors are paid a little over US$500 a month by the government. Staff often have to buy their own office supplies, computers and even light bulbs. We're finally getting some foreign grants from China to rebuild some of the laboratories, but there is no budget for paying subscriptions to journals. JSTOR provides reasonable discounts for developing countries, as does APNIC (for IP blocks) but it's difficult to try to build something when US45,000 a year is considered to be a low paying job and used as a baseline for access to information.

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.

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