[hugofirth]

I've said this before on other threads but frankly, scientific publishers represent institutionalised theft of tax payer money:

- Academics (most often publicly funded via grants and university salaries) do the work for free.

- They are expected to learn to use LaTeX and to typeset their work for free.

- They are expected to copy-edit the papers for free, or else pay a copy editor themselves with, you guessed it, public funds.

- Volunteer Academics (on university time and therefore, again, public money) are expected to review the work for technical accuracy and novelty. If done well this is extremely time consuming.

- Finally, the Journals have the temerity to charge the same universities who produce their product millions of pounds a year in journal subscriptions and Open Access fees.

- Finally finally, none of the Authors are ever paid for their work. Not that it matters, because again: public funding should mean public access.

The most frustrating part is that Academics themselves are locked into this system by the career prospects conferred by prestigious journals/conferences.

I like to hope the ACM and other signatories will face a backlash for this. But they most likely wont

[sramsay]

I'm a humanities scholar, and I have given talks where I basically hit every single point you make (we tend not to typeset our own work, and we create more book-length monographs, but aside from that . . .). I consider the situation to be essentially obscene, and so I make various arguments about open access, universities as "self publishers" of their own faculty's work, and point out that absolutely none of this requires abandoning peer review.

Honestly? You would think I had suggested that we close the doors of the university. I'm not about to let Elsevier or Pearson off the hook, but we (members of the ACM, the AHA, the MLA, etc.) are our own worst enemy when it comes to the existing model. I am constantly astonished at the way my colleagues' defend this abusive system. Though "defend" might be too strong a word for what is actually nothing more than an incoherent mixture of elitism and the belief that we have always done things a certain way because that way is certainly right.

[chubot]

Does anyone have any insight as to how this happened? Somehow the publishers have attained monopoly-level profits. Apparently they keep raising the prices and the customers can't do anything about it?

I'm not surprised that academics would write, typeset, copy-edit, or review the papers themselves.

I AM surprised that all the university administrators (of which there are "too many"?) don't push back at paying tens of thousands of dollars for the journals. I have heard some complaints, but they are apparently ineffective.

So I guess the journals have developed local monopolies over medicine, computer science, etc.?

Is it really just the "brand"? arXiV isn't as strong a brand as Elsevier or whatever?

-----

One thing I've noticed in academia is that brand and name recognition actually matter more than in engineering. In engineering, you can tell if it works or not. You can test it yourself.

In academia, there are only 3 other people in a subfield of a subfield who can tell if it's good. You can't tell yourself. It might take 10 years to sort out of the work is important / good.

So you have to rely on the brand. Popular brands being "this research is from Harvard for field X", or Stanford for field Y, etc.

So I guess "published in journal X" rather than "published in arXiV" is another brand. But somehow they have offloaded all the work that goes into maintaining the brand back onto the academics. Crazy.

[kilburn]

> Does anyone have any insight as to how this happened? Somehow the publishers have attained monopoly-level profits. Apparently they keep raising the prices and the customers can't do anything about it?

This happens because of historical lock-in. When you get evaluated as a researcher, the most important part of your curriculum are your publications. There are two things that matter about them:

1. Where are they published. There are rankings (done by the publishers) of the publications in each scientific area. For really important stuff, only papers published in Q1 (quartile one) publications matter.

2. How many citations they've got. Since there's so many garbage, people tend to cite other papers from well-known publications (nobody is going to question a claim you cite from a paper in a well-established journal, whereas if you cite a paper from a random unknown journal you'll have a harder time passing review).

As you can see, the path of least resistance to advance your own career as a researcher is to publish in the journals by the famous publishers. This also means they get the best papers, and the whole thing perpetuates itself.

> So I guess "published in journal X" rather than "published in arXiV" is another brand.

There's brand, but there's also process. A paper published in Nature has passed a number of filters and reviews that a paper published in arXiv hasn't. That's not a 100% guarantee (there are garbage papers in Nature and excellent ones in arXiv), but the average quality is much much much better in Nature.

[elihu]

I would add to that: when presenting their work at a conference, presenters must often pay the full price of admission to attend the conference. This can be in the range of one or two thousand dollars. This prevents anyone not associated with an academic institution with grant money at stake or a well-financed business from presenting their results.

[stjohnswarts]

I think the expense to speak is probably to prevent a lot of quacks working out of their basement from presenting hokey physics talks.

[lern_too_spel]

Instead of the government paying money to publishers for adminstration of peer reviewed publications, the government should directly produce peer reviewed publications as a public benefit. Neither the model of requiring the submitter to pay nor the model of requiring the reader to pay produces good outcomes for the dissemination of scientific discoveries.

[dredmorbius]

Keep in mind that the notion of peer review as a necessary element of academic publishing is itself a highly novel concept, dating to the 1970s.

[anjc]

If your issue is that tax payer money is being stolen then presumably open access should only be granted to citizens of a country, for research arising from academic institutions in that country? Otherwise countries will similarly be stealing tax payer money from one another. Actually, do public libraries get access to Elsevier etc?

[vincent-toups]

The presumption you're making is that a country would never spend money for the public good, where that is defined to include the entire human race, rather than just nationals.

Weird assumption! Generally speaking, academic research is considered to be an international, or super-national, cooperative effort in most fields.

[naringas]

> The presumption you're making is that a country would never spend money for the public good

I have just realized that I assume this to be the case. If a government ever does that is simply a collateral effect of their main purpose which is enrichment of the politicans involved in the process.

[anjc]

I don't make this assumption. I simply think OPs argument that research should be open because tax payers have funded it is weak, for the reason I stated, i.e. it implies that non-tax payers should not have access, or conversely, implies that taxpayers in each country should get to decide how this research is distributed, possibly restricting access to non-nationals.

> The presumption you're making is that a country would never spend money for the public good, where that is defined to include the entire human race, rather than just nationals.

I think in general this is the case? Obviously governments budget for foreign aid, and also contribute to collective efforts e.g. climate change or (relevant to this discussion) EU funds such as Horizon 2020. But I don't think any governments do/should consider "the public" as meaning "the entire human race".

[vincent-toups]

I think in the grand tradition of western government going all the way back to the greeks there is ample consideration given to the good as it pertains to the entire human race, not just nationals.

Read Nussbaum's book about cosmopolitanism - the introductory chapters provide plenty of evidence that historically speaking, elites have conceived of governments has having at least some obligation to all human beings, regardless of state.

[travisporter]

1. A->B does not imply !A->!B 2. Government foreign aid is a counterexample

[anjc]

I don't know what's meant to be A and B here. I already listed foreign aid as a counterexample in the post you're replying to.

[dredmorbius]

The fact much research is tax-subsidised is one but not the only argument for open public access to scientific research papers. Other arguments argue for broader access.

And tax-based support alone does not argue for closed access to a single country. There are tax-supported activities which aren't limited to benefiting, strictly, any or all of: taxpayers, citizens, or even residents of countries, among the latter foreign aid and cultural support.

The last of which scientific knowledge is an element.

[gdxhyrd]

> open access should only be granted to citizens of a country, for research arising from academic institutions in that country?

Fine with me, then countries can sort it out between themselves. Easy, considering way harder things have been done in international academic efforts.

> Actually, do public libraries get access to Elsevier etc?

No, they don't.

[y4mi]

i'm not sure i follow... the GP is basically saying: "its paid for by public money, it shouldn't be restricted"

how do you get from that to "i cant let anyone but people from my country look at this"?

there no logic in that whatsoever

[anjc]

The argument seems to be that access to research should be unrestricted because "scientific publishers represent institutionalised theft of tax payer money", i.e. that theft of tax payer money is bad. In that case, why should people who live in tax havens, low-tax countries, or countries that don't adequately fund academia, have their access to research subsidised by people who live in high tax countries and who fund the research via tax? This seems like the same issue except at a higher level, i.e. sovereign theft instead of institutional?

I have no problem with open access by the way, I'm not advocating for restrictive publishing practices here.

[y4mi]

still doesn't make sense because the foreign nations aren't depriving the people paying for the research of the information they paid for via taxes.

theft means that something was taken away from somebody else. this clearly isnt the case in your scenario, as the foreign nations just copied it.