[MaxBarraclough]

That would be preferable to the current norm, but I agree it wouldn't be ideal. With further terms attached to government research funding, that could be addressed too. The resulting work shall not be published in an outlet where fees exceed $X. That would also close the door on researchers being tempted to spend their own money on publishing in a more impressive publication.

A similar approach could be taken to prohibit publication in journals with embargo periods, i.e. paywalling for a couple of years before permitting open access. [0] For publicly funded research, that isn't acceptable either.

If such rules are applied consistently from all funding sources, the game would change quickly, by necessity. Collective bargaining where the government holds all the cards, essentially.

That's how I see it, at least. I'm not a researcher, and I'm not an expert on open access.

The current norm strikes me as plainly outrageous. Huge sums of tax money being handed over to publishers who make it their business to withhold tax-funded research from the people who funded it. It also strikes me as fixable. It's a tragedy of the commons, and the government has the power to force the matter and resolve the problem.

On the plus side, it looks like there's a real push to do this kind of thing. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access#Embargo_periods

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S

[sideshowb]

In my world (I am a researcher btw) I think expensive open access already is the current norm. But you're right, funders could start to impose limits. (Though I'm sure someone would raise an objection if they did, and I'd be interested to see what that was: your move, publishers!)

On a related note, reviewing work is highly skilled and usually unpaid. If (and that's a big if) we wanted to fix that, we'd have to make fees higher again.

[MaxBarraclough]

> reviewing work is highly skilled and usually unpaid. If (and that's a big if) we wanted to fix that, we'd have to make fees higher again

I'd be ok with that. Off the cuff, the way I see it there are a few options:

1. [Perhaps acceptable] The party behind the submitted paper pays the reviewers for their efforts. This might be done via the publisher, but that's just detail. The reviewers' employers do not treat reviewing as a work activity, i.e. reviewing work is done out of hours.

2. [Acceptable] The reviewers' employers pay the reviewers, treating review work as a routine part of their scientific duties.

3. [Acceptable, likely preferable] (Combining 1 and 2) The reviewers' employers pay the reviewers, treating review work as part of their scientific duties. The party behind the submitted paper pays the reviewers' employers, in compensation for the time spent on reviewing. This has the advantage that reviewing work can be neatly accounted for by all parties, and that, ideally, reviewing work need not be viewed as an additional professional burden atop ordinary working hours. (Whether that's likely to really work out given general academic career pressures, I'm not qualified to say.)

4. [Unacceptable] The reviewers go unpaid for their efforts, and only do the work out of an economically perverse sense of noblesse oblige