Honestly if even $1 of public money goes toward research, the work, data, journal, etc should all be public domain. End of story. That should be a basic requirement of taking public funds.
The NIH indeed requires all work published under their grants to be made available open-access. Problem is publishers figured out that meant they could charge EVEN MORE for submissions to be made open access than they charged for standard closed publishing. Wiley charged me $2,975 last year for an accepted submission to Human Brain Mapping.
And why did you pay if i may ask? I would guess it's because if you don't your career will be in trouble because that's what employers value.
The current state of affair isn't a random thing. It's because the global policy of employment in public research and the definition of success is completely stupid and based on metrics (i don't care which metrics, the sole fact that we try to quantify everything just makes this kind of situations possible).
Publish or perish my friend, you've hit the nail on the head. There is not currently a widely accepted avenue for free open publication in neuroscience because the preprint system (and its lack of peer review) are distrusted, and the A-tier journals know their status and can set their prices based on demand. I, on the other hand, am effectively required to show a regular pattern of publishing in A- and B-tier journals to even be considered competitive for a potential tenure-track position, let alone land one and earn tenure.
This is a major reason I am evaluating alternative career options.
They probably paid because, as the grandparent post suggested, taking public funds from NIH imposes a requirement to publish the research results in this manner, so for the research team it's an unavoidable part of the expenses related to the grant - and so it's not the researchers' money nor their decision; NIH defined what they want and so they're paying publishers a significant portion of their funding for that.
Indeed, most likely the question of paying or not wasn't even asked properly and this is just the norm.. In any case my point is that the problem of this capture from some scientific publishers is much deeper than just a problem of how publishing is setup. Its one of the many symptoms of how current research institutions are governed.
I know in the UK, all publicly funded STEM research must be published as open-access.
The problem is in this case, researchers have to pay a further premium to journals (>£4,000 per paper). So this funnels further public funds to the journals
The national Dutch funding agency that effectively funds all research in the Netherlands requires this. Buy considers it sufficient for you to publish in a closed journal and then deposit a copy in an open repository. The French also have a similar system I believe.
I agree to a large extent. At the same time, we have a problem in this country where scientists are paid a pittance for their fundamental work, which downstream is capitalized by corporations, paywalled, patented, and sold for a huge profit.
One thing that many scientists do is start businesses using their research, which serves as an incentive in the face of meager salaries. If not for the prospect of commercializing their work, many people might not even go into the field. In our capitalist system, this is unfortunately how things work.
So if you want to make scientific work all public domain, then as a society we need to make real investments into science to properly fund it. We also need to close the loop, such that large corporations who profit off this publicly funded work are forced to pay back into the system at a proportional rate. No more 0% corporate taxes, which cause money to pool at the top.
I don't see how scientists starting businesses and making the articles public domain are connected.
Having the articles freely available is good for encouraging discovery, communication and learning.
I don't see how that would significantly change the equation for protecting your business, as we assume the article was already available for 30 dollars.
If a 30 dollars fee is the only thing that stops someone from stealing your idea, it is either a bad idea, or your competitors don't realize it's a good one.