Hacker News Reader

Comment by dranudin | Hacker News Reader

It'd be great if this could one day be a real alternative to Elsevier. Today, professors and postdocs are doing the peer-review for Elsevier, for free. They can do that because they get a paycheck from the government (through university and grants). Then, the governments pay for Elsevier access through university libraries, ontop of that. It'd be much more efficient, if everybody could just publish and subscribe for free on a publicly funded platform.

View on HN

Arxiv and the internet do more for science than Elsevier. They're rent-seeking middlemen, having lost any of whatever their purpose might once have been.

I think the worst part is, Elsevier could still serve a purpose and make money by curating and leveraging reputation even if all academic research was openly published and freely accessible - they could select what they consider to be the best research, have editorial content, produce visualizations and accompany content with a high quality of journalism, like Quanta. Papers being locked, researchers and institutions paying out the nose, and the other artificial scarcity / artificial stupidity features are entirely unnecessary.

The problem - for them - is that they wouldn't be able to make as much money as a curator than as a grifter, a middleman. As a curator or a creator, they would be actually forced to work, as compared to the current rentier model that they enjoy.

Those executive bonuses don't pay for themselves you know.

For some disciplines unfortunately that's not true. In medicine the publishing cartel is much stronger than arxiv.

You absolutely need to solve the gatekeeping and reputation part, otherwise your newly-minted open access journal would be filled to the brim with cranks and charlatans.

You mean string theorists?

also dark materialists and dark energetists

In France we already have https://hal.science/ which is quite well integrated with arxiv.

However I don't think that it supports open review which this new cern initiative seems to promote. Great if followed and promoted by big national labs

There are many more publishers than Elsevier for scientific publications, some of which are already following a strictly open access policy.

Open access typically means authors pay a publication fee, which leads to the same result of the government paying twice and the journal profiting twice.

And most of those require ridiculous "article processing charges". Even non-profits. Elsevier is bad, but it's not much worse than other publishers.

Author (in practice author institution, in practice with public funds) pays open access is less bad than locking articles behind paywalls, but it's still a racket.

This CERN system is about diamond open access, meaning that neither authors nor readers pay.

It’s entirely optional. Seems fine to me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com