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Comment by shellac | Hacker News Reader

It looks like it's gold open access, btw, or even bronze AKA the worst one:

> [...] supported by Article Processing Charges (APCs), with the infrastructure to ensure that authors continue to face no financial barrier to publishing their science in the RAS journals

But they are making the entire archive available.

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Look… the parasites got to eat… and until we wrestle control of copyright out of the hands of Disney, Warner Brothers, Elsevier, Weily, O’Reilly, etc… and get some major reforms … well we at least have to celebrate when the parasites make decisions that benefit the public and only hurt smaller money holding interests.

In this case the change will be obvious, the university and/or the grant programs will wind up funding these fees… and students everywhere will benefit from this. Hooray!

And opening the archives is a big win for such a prestigious journal with a long history.

I would point out that the Royal Astronomical Society is a charitable organisation. It should not be put in a class with Elsevier and the like. The page charges actually go to the cost of publishing rather than to shareholder profits.

You know… it’s been so long since I thought about who actually owned a journal other than Elsevier, et, al … and your right, I had completely forgotten the Proceedings of The Royal Astronomical Society aren’t owned by one of the the big fat asshole publishers! So this is just all around a good thing!

Yes this is important to note: while the RAS is a charitable organisation, the publication process is facilitated by publishing companies (primarily OUP). Though exactly how the fees are distributed and what the arrangement is with OUP with regards to publication fees is, I'm not sure.

OUP provides the administrative side, platforms for submission/review, hosting and other editorial services. It doesn't make much sense for RAS to reimplement all of this from scratch.

What can seem like a small improvement can often delay or even prevent major overhaul of the system. It's throwing a few crumbs at the starving peasants and we scramble to pick them from the ground instead of demanding shares of the bread. There should not be private companies profiting off publicly funded research in the first place. If it's like you say and universities will be paying those fees, that's in some ways even worse. It wouldn't surprise me if the feudal copyright lords like Elsevier actually supported this. Best thing that can happen to them is getting their fees under the table and not in the open. The less students and the public understand about how it works, the better from their point of view.

> wrestle control of copyright out of the hands of Disney, Warner Brothers,

With generative AI, more content will be made on a per-year basis than all of recorded human history prior.

I don't think the kids will give a damn about Star Wars when they can make their own "Space Pirates vs Steampunk Captain Nemo 20XX: Ultimate Dad Joke Battle The Stakes Have Never Been Higher 2"

This has historically shown to not be the case. In the modern era, there's rarely any value in a raw idea, but how it affects those who observe it (mainly can it drive them to buy toys). It's been pretty consistently shown people like what's familiar, so we get an endless stream of mid sequels

When have kids (or any other non-specialist) previously been able to create their own customised blockbuster series, that looks like a professionally made show?

There was a time, a good few years ago, that the free 3D animation software Muvizu (sadly no longer around) envisioned kids doing just that. Here's a clip produced with Muvizu using assets from Shawn the Sheep. (Muvizu was at the time discussing collaborations with Aardman.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GF9Ul_hv55s

Isn't that still a fair way off...?

Yes, it probably is - but we can see the first glimmerings of it now. I thought that was what the parent comment was referring to, anyway.

The majority was already open and accessible via https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/. The rest would be on arxiv.

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