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Comment by _emacsomancer_ | Hacker News Reader

I think evaluating Gates as a do-gooder is somewhat inaccurate. His charitable actions all seem to align to increase his stock portfolio. And not only would open-sourcing scientific knowledge not likely help his stock portfolio, but it is antithetical to everything he has ever done in the software world.

What really needs to be done is more and more editors and editorial boards of Elsevier-owned journals revolting, as happened with Lingua, the prominent linguistics journal, where the entire editorial board resigned and started the Open Access journal Glossa. (Lingua lingers on as a 'zombie journal', filled with articles of very dubious quality. But everyone in the field knows this.)

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> Lingua, the prominent linguistics journal, where the entire editorial board resigned and started the Open Access journal Glossa

In case any readers aren't aware, "lingua" is Latin for 'tongue'/'language', while "glossa" (γλῶσσα) is Greek for 'tongue'/'language'. (We also have English words that come from the Attic dialect form "glotta" (γλῶττα); for Ancient Greek dialectal variation between σ and τ, see https://lucianofsamosata.info/TrialInTheCourtOfVowels.html.)

What really needs to be done is the government needs to require all research that is funded at all with tax payer money (which is the vast majority of research) must be open access to all

This is a very half-baked idea, but perhaps a compromise would be to make the text content free to access and reserve PDF downloads for subscribers or paying customers. Ideally the content would be presented through something like eLife's Lens project. [1]

[1]: https://github.com/elifesciences/lens

Tax-payers are surely already subscribers/paying customers.

They already do.

Here are links to the major US funding agency's policies.

NIH Public Access Policy: https://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm

NSF: https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/public_access/

DOE: https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/08/f18/DOE_Publ...

DoD: https://discover.dtic.mil/products-services/

PubMedCentral (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/) hosts full-text for biomedical journals that don't automatically provide un-paywalled access to covered articles, as does DTIC. The one caveat is that there is an optional one year embargo for journals that aren't open access.

You can often find PDFs on researchers' home pages, and preprints are increasingly common too.

Wait, on at least one axis, the DoD is less evil than the Elsevier? Oh, how the tables turn...

Well, all governments would have to do that, and actively enforce that. Many do already, few enforce it.

Alternatively, there is now a coalition of funders that is taken an even stronger stance: not only must research they fund be published as open access, but the journals they are published in may not hide other research behind paywalls either.

If enforced (big if), this could give an important push to making open access the default, even for places where the government does not demand it that strongly yet. However, it would help to have some more big hitters explicitly sign up, most notably the US.

[1] https://www.coalition-s.org/

Yet, the Gates Foundation is one of the most important driving forces towards Open Access.

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