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Comment by lumost | Hacker News Reader

Scientific papers should have more limited copyright protections around distribution. No one except journals benefits from the current situation, and the service they provide around connecting submissions with reviewers seems ripe for replacement if any institution lends their credibility to the matter.

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Any research paid for with tax dollars should be public domain.

I've been told academic journals don't even pay peer reviewers. Is that true? Peer review is the whole point of a journal and is what sets them apart from just publishing a PDF on the internet. If peer reviewers aren't even getting paid for their invaluable service, nothing stops them from forming their own independent peer review group.

In most cases yes, peer reviewers are not paid. These companies are pretty much a paywalled pdf hosting service hence the outrage against them.

I can't actually think of anyone who has been paid for a review in the sciences.

The most I've personally gotten was a nice note from an editor; I've heard rumors of someone who reviewed enough to get some journal-branded swag (a mug or calendar, I think). If you review a book, you might get to keep the copy.

Nobody gets cash.

I've been compensated for one review, and for peer-reviewing a book proposal, gotten some free books.

That is, in fairness, three instances over what is by now probably well over 100 reviews.

Yes, there is no monetary compensation. But the currency here is community service. If your CV lists you as reviewer, program chair, technical committee on XYZ, it makes you look important. And you get to see very early who in your field is working on what. It has networking effects and you get to know people (other reviewers and committee members).

That's why academics do it. Most of them anyway. All for "free".

Yes!

Literally the copyright for scientific articles should be 1 year. This is how we fix open access.

OK.

Step one: Renegotiate the Berne Convention.

Just abandon it. International treaties are mostly hindrances to progress because re-negotiating them is considered hard to impossible. States should aim to be free from such obligations and reduce the amount of applicable treaties as far as possible.

The NIH and the Wellcome Trust both negotiated effectively this - papers funded by those organizations are open access within 12 months.

No, they should be immediately open-access. Why give commercial publishers a 1-year exclusivity window for free?

My level of cynicism at this point is so high that I'd assume we'd be forced to add narratives to papers until they resemble the five-thousand word life story you find tacked on to a recipe to escape the "just a list" issue. [And breathe]

Although, full agreement if that doesn't become a problem or you have a solution for it already prepared :)

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