[rotskoff]

Currently, for "hybrid" journals, the researcher must pay a publishing fee, typically on the order of $2000-$3000. I have an independent postdoctoral fellowship, which means I have some funding, but not enough for it to make sense to pay. These fees essentially lock me out of open access publishing.

Of course, I could simply choose to publish only in open access journals (running the risk of career consequences). I hope changes like this will lead to increasingly prestigious fully open access journals. However, I have found the most practical option to be posting my papers on arXiv.

[chrisseaton]

I don't know what field you're in, but in my field, nobody pays to publish, and everyone just puts pre-prints on their websites and everyone seems totally happy with that. Is pre-prints on websites or arXiv not an option for you for some reason?

[cyphar]

In Physics, I was told that pre-prints were only useful if you had no other way to access the canonical version of the paper (in my university, we didn't have access to a bunch of large journals and there's no way I'm paying hundreds of dollars for papers for a summer research project). In my experience, pre-prints often have different information than that actual published version (though I made sure any papers I co-authored would have identical versions in both).

I obviously found this quite concerning, given that I also work in the world of free software and I know how much of a benefit public access has in a field as opaque as software (let alone something as important to human development as science). But it is the reality, because there is still a view that pre-prints are only meant to be a place to stash away your first drafts of a paper and that the actual journal is where the real paper is stored. Luckily the journal I submitted to (MNRAS) didn't care about submitting pre-prints to arXiv (some do).

(Don't get me started on the fact that some journals still require you to pay them for papers written in the early 1900s. The authors are long-dead, and you've made more than enough commission on Feynman's papers on positrons.)

[jhbadger]

Because in most fields, preprints count for nothing. Not for priority, and certainly not for tenure decisions and the like. In fields like biology and chemistry an actual journal article is required (at least at present; there are attempts at preprint sites for biology at least but only enthusiasts use them at present). And publishing in a journal costs money one way or another. Either you expect your audience to have a journal subscription (which can cost tens of thousands of dollars per year meaning that only large universities may subscribe), or you have to pay the costs of publishing your article yourself so that it is available for free. Neither are great options, but for most non-physics/math fields, those are the options.

[Vinnl]

Note that Plan S also states that the funders aim to push for academics to be recognised for the value of their research, not the name of the journal it was published in. Wellcome explicitly added to its requirements [1] that organisations they fund must also sign the San Fransisco Declaration on Research Assessment, meaning that they should commit to this.

(Disclaimer: I work on a project that also has this goal.)

[1] https://wellcome.ac.uk/news/wellcome-updating-its-open-acces...

[tinus_hn]

Note that this money goes to the journal editors; the major effort in publishing is reviewing which is a volunteer job.

[mattkrause]

Not very editors are well-paid either. Most of this money goes to publishing companies.

[ModernMech]

I don't consider reviewing to be volunteer work, like say, running an after school club at the local middle school to teach kids how to program. I wouldn't list reviewing under the "service" section of my CV, but rather the "professional development" section. The reason being is that as an academic, I expect and require someone to step up and review my work when it comes time to publish it. If I don't want to pay for that work, then I better be willing to do it for free when someone asks me. You see, I'm getting something in return, so I don't think reviewing a paper is a very selfless thing to do.

[chrisseaton]

> reviewing which is a volunteer job

No it's one of your paid professional responsibilities as part of your job, if you work in academic or industrial research, which is almost all reviewers.

[tinus_hn]

Is that paid for by the journal out of the publishing fee?

[chrisseaton]

No it's not. That doesn't make it 'volunteer' work for the researcher. You can count it as part of the fee the institution pays to the journal if you want, and I can understand not liking it, but it's not volunteer work.

[xamuel]

>pre-prints on their websites

People don't realize how inadequate this is long-term. Hundreds of years from now when scholars look back at the early 21st century, it's going to look like the dark ages.

[tialaramex]

Institutions with pro-OA policies will either require their employees to shove stuff into their own archive, or they'll automatically crawl their staff's sites to add to the archives. Those archives are usually controlled by the same department as the university's library, people who already have some idea about preserving things for "hundreds of years from now".

In the UK the funding mechanism for (some?) academic research hinges on publication data so there's a rationale for bean counters to ensure the archive is properly funded - if you build this Open Access archive you get the data for your funding paperwork as an output. So this creates an incentive even in fields where Open Access is not normal.

(e.g. big swathes of Physics are OA, same in Computer Science, but for all I know Paleontology is a desert for open access)

[chrisseaton]

You can publish in the conferences and journals, which maintain the archives and (I think?) still physically print and deposit in libraries of record.

But still also put the pre-print on your website.

[z0r]

the Internet Archive may prevent this from happening, despite retroactive robots.txt declarations and other such nonsense

[jefft255]

A pre-print is what it is: a version you put online before actually publishing your paper in a conference or a journal. In no field whatsoever an online pre-print is considered equivalent or sufficient compared to a peer-reviewed publication. I wonder which field you are talking about. We're talking about pay to publish here, not pay to read.

[paulgerhardt]

The pre-print loophole is exploited by people who publish in IEEE (electrical engineering) and ACM (computer science) which require assigining exclusive rights to the final article but not the final pre-print. After the final article is accepted but before publication a new clone is put up on their personal website with the name “final pre-print”.

It’s understood in these two fields in these two journals that IF the article was published, the “final pre-print” is identicle and is a “pre-print” in name only for licensing circumvention reasons.

Don’t know about other fields. But CS and EE are particularly prickly about this issue. See for instance Matt Blaze’s discussion: http://www.mattblaze.org/blog/copywrongs

[tialaramex]

For similar reasons Guinea Worm Wrap-up, the main publication about global progress on the eradication of Guinea Worm (a parasitic worm, like not a microbe, not virus, an actual worm, that bursts out of people's legs if they're infected - disgusting and, of course, painful) has a bit of text at the end that says this:

Inclusion of information in the Guinea Worm Wrap-Up does not constitute “publication” of that information.

[allenofthehills]

My perception is that CS is the only field which has generally normalized and accepted pre-prints in lieu of formally peer-reviewed articles. I can say that in my field (Health Sciences), biorXiv is the most applicable pre-print site, but in my experience, none of my colleagues have heard of it.

[Vinnl]

The final sentence of GP's comment actually mentioned arXiv being most practical.

[chrisseaton]

Yes I meant with a pre-print - it sounded like they meant putting them on arXiv instead of trying to publish in a journal at all?

[UncleMeat]

Arxiv is not open to all fields.

[Vinnl]

I was responding to a comment asking whether arXiv was an option in response to someone saying arXiv was most practical, so I'm sure that person's field is welcomed on arXiv.

[Vinnl]

An important but as-yet rather underspecified part of the Plan S is to find different reward structures that remove the pressure to publish in "prestigious" journals and move to a system that mainly focuses on the quality of research. It will be interesting to see what they come up with here, and whether that will be successful.

(Disclaimer: I am working on a project that hopes to improve the prestige for open access publications and preprints.)

[fjuerfilis]

I think all of this is generally a step in the right direction but am worried about where it is leading, for two reasons:

1. My experience with the frontiers of open access science in my field have been concerning, in that it seems to feed even more off of the social media hype-TED-talk branch of academics that I see as just as much a problem. That is, with traditional closed publishing, you have lack of access to the public and lack of transparency which seems unacceptable, but with very open access platform things can turn into a petty social media popularity contest. Yes, you get your stuff out, but the dynamics can be very different and feel more like a glorified flamewar ala reddit or old-style USENET groups.

Related to this, I think the way peer review plays out in different fields is very different. So, arXiv stuff might seem normal in comp sci, math, stats, but if you ever want to see uptake of that in an applied field, it had better have a rubber stamp of peer review or no one will touch it.

2. Unfortunately, at many universities, at least in the US and the UK, the pressure and nonsense has moved (increased?) from publishing from prestigious journals into grants. That is, the power structures underlying this all are indirect costs (in the US) subsidizing universities. The problems with this are problems in the way grant monies are allocated and awarded, the kind of "slush fund" quality of the indirect costs that afford universities profits, and the vast inequities across disciplines and topic areas in terms of what requires funding and what is popular at any given time (some research, for example, just requires less money to conduct; this should be a good thing for research funding, but is a bad thing from the university perspective because there's less indirect money to siphon off of).

The reason why I bring this up here is because I think the publishing problem and grant problem are kind of linked, but in a way that makes the open access issue kind of missing the target in terms of where the big problems with academics currently are. I worry, for example, that if you move to a model where everyone just publishes whatever anywhere, it turns academics into a giant flamewar, decreases the value of good research per se even more relative to grant receipts (because it's all fuzzy anyway and everyone can post anything to arXiv), etc.

I definitely think academic publishing needs to become totally open. But my current sense is that there isn't a good infrastructure to replace it in many fields, especially the biomedical fields, and pathologies in those areas will just sort of rip what's left of its integrity apart.

[AnaniasAnanas]

Is there any reason not to do what DJB does?

https://cr.yp.to/writing/ieee.html - basically he puts his papers in public domain and then publishes them both on his site and on a normal journal.

[tanderson92]

Not that I disagree with the strategy, but DJB also has no career risk. The way you know that is that I am not in his field and I know what the abbreviation stands for.

[rocqua]

Some journals will not accept a paper that they do not have exclusivity on.

[ramraj07]

Don't publishers like plos provide a hardship exemption precisely for folks like you?