The thing is I am beginning to believe we are at the start of a "kind of" electronic hive mind. That information can be disseminated so fast via the internet that we will have an explosion of new science. But only if we can access it. Edit The internet is like the millennial's Gutenburg Press.
Sounds like the concept of the World Brain developed by H.G. Wells. You could say that the history of the recent information revolutions is a history of the World Brain. But paywalls behind crucial information is holding back its potential.
The only problem is that a lot of scientific papers are very hard to read unless you have a background in that field. It took me a few years to finally be able to read chemistry papers comprehensively. Also, most papers are flawed and uneducated people who read them can spread false news. It happens all the time already
redman777ful I do understand there would be a learning curve for the majority of the public. They would need to become aware that 9 out of 10 published papers are flawed although that does not necessarily mean the conclusion is flawed. I think the ability to have several billion people looking for those flaws would find them faster.
redman777ful More public discourse is always better, even if facts are not conveyed perfectly. The world will be better educated for it. And the real value in this would be from experts in the field, and experts in other fields even, benefiting from open access to others' works. Also the potential for way broader and comprehensive peer-review means the quality of science would be better all-around.
Better yet, take 1% away from the ludicrously bloated and overfunded social programs and welfare paying the lazy to not work from their cradle to their grave, and you'll have some 10 times more! Do both to satisfy your ignorant agenda, and simultaneously fund what deserves to be funded...
Personally I despise the pay for model. When someone references a paper whether in a lecture or paper I always try to verify their information. The way the system currently works I could spend hundreds of dollars every month just trying to make sure the information I was given is correct.
Not for free. Your university still pays for it, which means that it's basically included in your tuition (or future taxes). Still, it is true that both scholars and students generally have unfettered access to these papers.
I'm not sure what your area of study is but mine is communications & media and for my research, I don't pay for it as I just use publicly available material such as online news articles, books from the local/campus library, online magazines or setting up interviews if need be.
I thank Alexandra Elbakyan for making things easy for students like us, who cannot afford those high priced research papers from which even scientists cannot benefit. Sci-Hub is my temple. and Alexandra is the priest.
Imagine a Wikipedia charging $20 for viewing a single article. No they just ask for donation few times a year to run the world's largest knowledge base. I am happy to support them.
2:22 Servers and bandwidth are already paid for with Internet access service fees (your Internet provider that you pay every month and the institutions Internet service fees that they pay every month). So, no, there is no additional cost involved in publishing online. That ability is already paid for. I can guarantee you that, if scientists and journals simply stopped printing paper and everyone went with the open access model, then yes, everyone would be reading their science journals online and yes, it would be free to read all science papers and all the costs would be covered.
even if BigRalphSmith got something wrong... the ammount of money that has to be paid for web storage and traffic is almost nothing compared to the whole printing and shipping process... its like using youtube compared to dvds... (not that old movies & shows would be cheap to watch legally...)
I thought about including it, but Sci-hub doesn't really have anything to do with *why* papers aren't free. Taking the papers without permission and hosting them so others can read them is a Robin Hood model; taking from the "rich" and giving to "the people." Someone paid for the papers that were taken and re-hosted. Those papers were downloaded using 'stolen' authentication credentials from educational institutions (students pay for that access with their tuition), researchers (who pay for papers with their hard-fought grants), R&D departments, etc. Again, *someone* paid for that knowledge. I feel like this is a sidebar to the wider conversation, though, an interesting one. Sci-hub's taking and re-hosting of papers that were paid for by someone else misses the point relative to why the papers aren't just free in the first place. NOTE: I struggle to read these papers without breaking the bank too! Personally, I can't help but enjoy the effort, but it's not a real solution to the actual problem with access.
@@TraceDominguez Really no one responded to that shield of a response after 3 years. Wow. That video was nothing more than excuses as to why it should not be free. You claimed that hosting all that stuff is has a cost. Sci-hub is providing the hosting for free to everyone, so that's a mute point. You claimed that most of these research are already paid for with tax money, that's why it should be free. You claimed that reviewers need to be paid, who developed that system of reviewers anyway. All these layers of review were created to benefit the business model. Peer Review can be voluntary... just like when I had to review and grade my classmate work. Authors who financed their own research don't need a publisher to get the material out there, a simple website would suffice, search engines will pick it up. It's 2020. NOTE: At least you can still afford to read them. Many can't.
@@ravilamontagne9836 Guess who's not going to answer?... You can add to your argument that, aside from morals and economics, sharing information is just vital for science to work properly. This publication and, in general, economical model heavily hurts science and, by extension, human welfare in general. We are capable of just so much more...
Here are the science publications listed in the vid. Science AAAS: www.sciencemag.org/ (Mostlye Paywalled) PLOS ONE: journals.plos.org/plosone/ (Open Access) MacMillan Publishing - Nature: www.nature.com/nature/index.html (Mixed) RELX Group: www.relx.com/Pages/Home.aspx (Mixed) Support the model you favor!
Thank you for the links. I may be disabled and on a fixed income but my brain isn't dead. Learning is still a never ending journey especially when you don't understand and have to research.
John Doe Really you want to go there...okay. It's 5 herniated cervical discs and a dislocated 3rd cervical vertebra. Fortunately the spinal cord is still intact but the legs get a little iffy sometimes. Fortunately that means I can grow my medication. Have a good new year!
Research should be public access. If that research is used for a for profit product there should be an honor system where an equitable percentage of profits is agree upon.
I don't know if this problem still exists but there used to be criteria for university researchers that ended up being "publish or perish". This used to lead to a bunch of papers with very little added between papers on the same subject by the same researcher(s). You'd think something significant was added between papers but not so. I think there probably is still a lot of useless publishing of papers out there .. waste. I don't know how to fix the problem in an economical way. Maybe issue CD's and have anything printed on paper done where it's economical .. like Korea. I was asked some ridiculous amounts here in Canada for 10 to 20 copies of a unbound book. 50 with a very nice cover with shipping to Canada, from Korea, for the same price.
Research papers are usually pieces of a bigger picture. Being able to 'Google' a subject and not having to make the same discovery over and over because you did not have access to the information I would think is a problem that scientist have had. So I think search engines are the way to go. Maybe in order to access all research you need to register you personal information. Almost like checking out a book at a library.
Most of these scientific research and salaries of the scientists is already paid for by grants given to them by governments, corporations, NGOs, institutes, etc who all have an invested interest in the research. The main problem is the publishing company and who will pay them to publish the scientific journals. Ink and paper does cost money and someone will have to cover those costs.
Oh yeah, I thought those aren't counted already. But still, as far as I know, they don't get money from us through our monthly internet bills. Their main source really is ad revenue.
so you can have hundreds of gigabyte of data on the cloud for free but we can not have a free hosted, free peer-reviewed research paper. I don't thin cost is the issue.
nothing is free. If you're getting "free" cloud storage, read the Terms of Service. Google/Facebook/etc aren't free at all, you're paying by giving them access to your private information.
True. So...if we host academic content in a free cloud..google/facebook will have access to it...Good...so whats the problem??....no matter how you try to justify it this pay-for-access publishers are a big rip off, but not as much as the pay-to-publish scumbags.
Trace Dominguez Yet I don't personally and directly have to pay any money. I could post a downloadable PDF of a peer reviewed paper on facebook, and neither I nor the people reading it have to pay money. Isn't that strange? This scenario conforms to neither of the two possibilities mentioned in the video.
As a scientist, I believe in the open access model which would allow free access to the reader hence greater dissemination of the author's works. The author can pay the costs usually through their own grants or institution funding.
Just use sci-hub. Put in a link to ANY research-oriented thing(or publication number for IEEE), and you can download it for free. Just like you're supposed to be able to. Upvote this so as many people as possible can see it.
Sorry if this was already posted (couldn't find it) but first, thanks for the story. Second, while it's true publishing costs money, you neglected to mention that commercial publishers tend to charge rates using a pricing scheme similar to kidnapping. Highly regarded journals can cost tens of thousands of dollars per year and universities must pay the ransom or be left out of the scholarly conversation. Not to mention names, but some "academic" publishers have ranked among the most profitable corporations worldwide in the past, and these always increasing costs are a major reason why a college education has become impossible for many otherwise-worthy working-class students who lack top grades.
As a graduate student, I prefer the open-access model, because I can budget to get my paper reviewed and published, and if others needed to pay for the ability to publish, then papers would be more polished to have a better chance of publication. This makes it hard for cash-strapped researchers to publish, so having a dual-charge option where they pay less and the article costs some smaller amount to get makes sense. I know that when I see a paper that costs over $10, I figure out if it's actually worth it to my research. If so, I just look at what's available (figures, references, etc), which usually gives me the gist of the paper. I think that the researchers would rather their work get read rather than fading into what is essentially "noise" in my research. Because honestly, I have yet to find a paper where I couldn't get the contents from their sources and from papers that cite them. That said, sometimes the publisher does add significant value to the process or articles, and then I'm fine paying. For example, UpToDate is a medical database that literally has articles included within the week they publish. They provide summaries at different levels of expertise, and a host of valuable tools and references, and they should be able the charge a significant amount for their suite, because it is a huge value add. It's when publishers do little more than collect articles and think they should be able to charge for being a library that I get annoyed.
Nah, come on. Yes bandwidth costs money, but text? As just plain ascii text you could put every medical paper in the world onto a thumbstick. Hyperbole yes, but the point is that saying the cost of the bandwidth stops the industry from sharing text information is weak. People wanting to make money off other people's work is the simple truth.
I somehow managed to make a BlogSpot account without paying anything. If I published studies on academic journals, I could easily then copy and paste these studies onto BlogSpot. It would be entirely possible and at no cost to me or those reading it for me to have all of my published studies available on BlogSpot.
If money comes from the public coffers either through direct tax money or tax exemption status, then it should be open-access for the public good. It's a public service.
credibility is the biggest factor behind publications. I have seen to many self published papers that just reference the authors other works. now to many Internet wonders happen with out validation.
If the science is paid for from donations or government funding then there is no reason not to pay for the publication of it. Should be part of it seems like common sense to me.
Servers are expensive, but bandwidth is not expensive. The bandwidth excuse is one of the traditional ways companies hoard money when it domes to server space or ISP fees. In reality, bandwidth is sold as a specific product when, in reality, usage costs a company almost no money unless the traffic is very heavy. Even the bandwidth loaned out to companies is dirt cheap, with a just a few dollars per TB, and scientific papers, regardless of popularity, are not using many TB of data every month. But considering the issue of should this science be free? It's nice when something is open to the public, as I read from a lot of journals, but I do not believe we should be forcing models on companies.
So giving trillions in grants from tax payer money with no return ever and then letting them sell the discovery/data for a profit to someone....... You're ok with paying twice for stuff?
Darth Obscurity I believe in economic freedom, not bureaucratic control, so yes, I'm perfectly fine with that. I'd rather governments not even give the grants to be fair, and for research to be paid for by private demand as it should be.
Global Warming Skeptic What were working conditions like before they began regulating businesses? What private demand is there to keep prices where everyone can afford them instead of maximizing profits for things like food? What was the starvation rate before social safety nets and things like minimum wage? Accident rates before safety laws and OSHA? I'll agree that regulation has gone overboard, but unregulated markets are historically far worse.
Darth Obscurity I am not arguing for a 100% free market. I believe that food, clothing, and shelter are all rights, but when you go beyond survival necessities, it gets to be nonsense. Fact is that things did not improve because of those regulations. Technology improved our lives, particularly the Industrial Revolution, which freed many people from back breaking labor once required to survive. Science literature is not a survival necessity, thus should not be regulated by any bureaucratic body.
Regulations absolutely improved peoples' lives. Otherwise we'd still be in the post-industrial but pre-Homestead and Blair Mountain days when it was common for people to work 10 hour days 6 days a week for almost no pay, usually starting around age 10-12 or younger, in unsafe conditions.
A lot of scientists dual publish - they send to a journal, but also offer it free to the public on their own websites. I get it that if you want the services of a publisher, someone has to pay. My experience though, is that the fees for single copy downloads seem exorbitant - often as much as $40, particularly since you don't really know if you'll find the publication useful until after you've paid. You're basically buying mostly sight unseen, and you can't return it.
If scientific journals in the US were funded by tax money, it would be catastrophe. Any journal publishing paper in which the future president "don't believe in" would loose the support immediately.
TheUglyGnome You definitely have a point, but there are ways to get around that obstacle. We need to push for less corruption in our government or else it's going to fail us in every respect, not just science.
TheUglyGnome But you could also make that same argument against the president having any amount of power whatsoever. How about instead, the system should be set up in such a way that complete idiots like Trump can't get into power?
the value-add is metadata: peer review, pre registration, etc. universities should be able to host their own papers for basically zero marginal cost; but might still be willing to pay for the extra data that lets others know that those papers are actually of some value (and users may be willing to pay to know that there not reading junk (and sue when the journal fails to properly vet)
The issue is not that publishers charge money for access to their publications, but that they charge as much as they do. If you're a professional scientist, working in industry or academia, your personal access to published papers is effectively free because your institution picks up the tab for the journal subscriptions. (How academic institutions get their funds is more complex than the average citizen is aware, and off-topic here). The problem is that if you're a "civilian" who wants to read a scientific paper that isn't "open-access", then you're faced with a cost of something like $50 for a few pages. This pricing is aimed at industrial customers whose pockets are deep because such costs are ultimately passed on to the consumer. Scientific publishers don't seem to understand that there is a market for their material in the public at large, and that they could sell a hell of a lot more copies of their articles if they charged a nominal few bucks.They've already covered their initial production costs - the rest is apparently just greed or stupidity. But some university libraries will let you access their resources for a modest annual fee. Just my opinion, as they say.
One of the most under-appreciated aspects of the Gutenberg Press was the plethora of little pamphlets that began to appear; "How to build a brick wall", "How to thatch a roof", "How to make a pair of shoes''. Within decades, the guild systems were largely extinct; freed from the suffocating constraints of skill secrecy, and led to a rapid upward-swing of technological innovation from that point forward. Ironically, the scientific diaspora embraced the antiquated guild-like system, morphing itself into an institution in which information was only made available to the select few organizations and industries capable of purchasing the very expensive subscriptions, limiting the public to a menu of click-bait; short, often inaccurate summaries of yellow science journalism. This has to change. Now.
As an academic currently working on my Masters in International Relations, we are privileged to have access to virtually all research papers for free through our University subscription system (both hard sciences and soft sciences). Many universities have this system, enabling students to freely research other works in leading journals around the world for their academic purposes. With that said, let's be very real here. The average citizen would not have the foggiest clue what the hell they were reading if they had access to all of the wonderful scientific literature that is produced on a regular basis around the world. They don't understand the format or process, and they likely would not understand 80% of the words that are being used. The only way to tackle that hurdle is to scientifically educate the masses, especially with regards to critical thinking skills and the ability to analyze and absorb the information being delivered in a scientific paper, and unfortunately, especially here in the United States, most people are about as sharp as a bowling ball and have zero willpower for such things.
In short, the (public) schooling and educational system has to be seriously changed and improved, in particular putting far more effort regarding STEM.
Jupyter notebooks, once called ipython notebooks, are a way to present articles with data, processing and results in a form that can be rendered as a web page and printed. Since the underlying format is a notebook, data and processing programs can be published and rerun as reproducible results. There are many disciplines where notebooks are used, and they can even be used as wikis. Jupyter supports Markdown Format so people can reply via context to notebooks. The content does not have to be science, it could be used for any discussion. Jupyter notebooks could become an alternative to blogs and social media sites for serious, detailed discussions. If notebook servers could be scaled they could support many uses and do that better than social media and blogs.
I'd say "Have the governments of the UN or the EU or the US pay for these", as spreading the costs to all nations above a certain GDP would make it a really tiny portion to each. However, I've been looking at the US and UK government recently and... well, that way lies madness, corruption, and unfathomable ineptitude.
Publishing costs are fixed costs. Massively reducing charges to view will allow many more people to access the journals while still recovering the costs. Also advertising and other means of revenues should be explored. Journals should be economically accessible to both authors and readers. And it should be exclusively online. If a researcher does not use the internet, the person should not be researching!!! And who needs to subscribe to a 200 page journal if the person finds just 20-30 pages worth of material of interest? One can just get the papers printed. It would be cheaper.
We could move scientific journals to the background without affecting revenue. We could just create a Publicly funded Registration of Education for Citizens and Foreign Nationals who purchase access, or achieve status through benefiting their field of research in some way. All registration would be Federal, Like a Passport. Your virtual Passport would collect a record of your credibility, such as relevant experience, level of study achieved, and access to information granted. This could be used as a Global Education System, offer a Market for distribution of education resources, and halt the era of disinformation in its tracks. This would act like a Wiki where credibility is only achieved through relevant knowledge and the ability to provide links to proof in the scientific journals that make up the infrastructure behind the scenes(for a price$). Education could be free for everyone, and vetted entirely based on knowledge, rather than politics. Yet still make enough money to generate profit for the publishers.
This could seriously stall scientific and technological progress. If you think about it nothing is more important. This determines how fast we develop better energy sources, cures for disease, space exploration, etc... Everything that improves humanity over the long-term is encapsulated in scientific progress. Our society and all aspects of public policy, in fact I'd say all aspects of life should be structured accordingly. If money has to be spent even on the internet then the government should subsidize the cost and ban both the author or the reader from having to pay.
It's probably already done, but why not a free digital paper with an optional pay-for physical copy subscription (and to order papers previously published individually)? That, plus donations might suffice to cover server costs and the like.
Severs and bandwidth don't matter that much. Arxiv works fine, after all. The thing that you're paying for, according to the journals themselves at least, is the peer reviewing process.
Open Access is a successful business model. Probably BioMed Central, now part of Nature-Springer Publishing Group, is the pioneer in this business. While for the readers it's like a blessing, for some authors the unusually high publication charge is something beyond their reach. If your organisation (institution) has no OA policy you'll have to pay a massive amount of money out of pocket. Most of the OA publishers adopted a fee waiver policy for low-middle income countries though.
It's nice to know that a lot of scientific journals are hindering scientific progress because of their price gouging. Why not just go all out, eh? I mean, why not make it so that you have to have 1 subscription which has a monthly cost just to have the privilege of paying per paper to review and then if they say yes, paying again per approved paper to get it published, and then they have to pay another subscription per monthly basis even though they're already paying monthly subscription just to be able to have the privilege of being able to pay per copy of their own published papers, and general readers of the journal's journal articles have to pay a monthly subscription fee to have the privilege of being able to pay per copy per journal article? Maximum price gouging!!
Simple suggestion. Makes the journals free to academic institutions immediately on publishing. Businesses have no problem paying to remain cutting edge, as well as those with the money to keep up. After a reasonable period, say 1 year after publishing, then the archived journal becomes freely available to all in a digital only format.
It's quite disgraceful that scientific knowledge costs either the scientists themselves or the public who's trying to gain the knowledge. Regardless of the real world reasons for this, something needs to be done, some kind of RUclips system with ads or whatnot would be great. Cmon RUclips, get into the scientific paper publishing, we'd all be great full for it
Cheapest way to get access to, well most scientific papers is to just enroll in a uni. At least here the uni pays the bill and students and faculty get free access. Alternatively you can get a starving uni student to get you the necessary paper.
I was thinking you could limit advertising strictly to approved manufacturers of science equipment though.It wouldn't take a huge amount of revenue to keep it running. I mean, I'm not generally a huge fan of commercialising academia, but if the site were displaying ads for telescopes and centrifuges, that seems pretty benign, even useful.
but then again, you give companies control over science magazines. its not really about the products (that part sounds somewhat useful), its about being influenced in decision making. the question is: how can we gurantee everyone acess to a broad variaty of current scientific works. the answer is libraries. :|
illyounotme They've probably already thought of it. I think it might be too inconsistent for publishers to use advertising. It's like blogging. If you blog if you want to make advertising money on it you have to write a lot, and write popular. Science journals are likely not a good place to put ads. Though I could be wrong about that.
sitting here trying to answer a question my professor asked that I don't have time to go to the university library and access, but the paper that DOES answer it is $25 online. Screw that. Sci hub it is. I will pay a reasonable price for convenience (0.25 to 0.50 USD to read a paper as a consumer? sure. $5 a month for access to the entire journal's articles? sign me up) but I will inconvenience myself with piracy when the only legal option is designed to take advantage of me.
Why not just charge the way people charge with other media? Have it be free for education, and then have different corporate licensing options. In this way companies like IBM can spend a little dough and everyone gets a free ride. RIP Aaron Swartz
they should put ads on the side of the papers and you can pay to get rid of them, that way you make money of everyone and everyone still gets to see it.
I can understand the traditional model and why it would be such a popular choice. Making authors pay seems like vanity publishing; a ridiculous way to get legitimate science into the public scene unless the author controls the entire product and not the publisher. Open-access sounds spectacular, but again someone does have to pay for all the work involved with publishing(online or hardcopy) so where would those funds come from? I'm not in favor of a paywall, but charging reasonable fees for subscribers or using advertising revenue to pay for the publishing, along with converting scientific journals to non-profits that can also accept tax deductible donations, seems like an ideal solution. Until we have an unlimited renewable energy source, the world isn't free; everyone has to have some income to live.
Scientific research is financially supported by grants from governments and non-profit foundations, yet the publication of the results of that same research is not. That doesn’t make any sense and has led to the big journal publishing corporations like Elsevier, Springer, etc, putting the work of scientists behind “paywalls”. Free access to what other scientists have done is _essential to the progress of science,_ which is being hampered by this crazy system.
Yes, but we no longer need to publish when we can go paperless on the internet... the community will do pear reviews through college grad degree cross checking. Strange that nasa’s entire budget costs a fraction of a penny to tax payers but scientific research cost over $30 per article on top of taxes... so why don’t we just pay taxes for a government mainframe or non profit origination
public funded journals. I dont see why is this so complicated. The benefits of public funding of science is so obvious that pretty much every modern nation does it. Its the most obvious thing to also facilitate the publishing and access to these studies by the means of public funding.
It'd be nice if it could be done in a pay-what-you-can model where universities pay a chunk, researchers looking for previously done studies pay a chunk, etc. Not sure it would still cover all costs though.
How about scientific research and scientists receive their salary/funding from grants (whether it'd be from governments, corporations, NGOs, institutes, etc) and the journals be published for free with the publishers receiving a cut of the grant money to compensate for publishing costs. Alternately, scientists can publish their findings for free online should they so choose so long as they still receive funding and salary from the one paying them the grants.
Someone has to select the best papers for peer review, oversee that peer review and select the papers that deserve publication after peer review. The journal has to be printed and distributed. All this costs money. I suspect that the EU may see a significant drop in papers that the EU has paid for getting published, because these journals can't afford to operate at a loss. They may find that the papers that do get peer reviewed and published will be publish by non-EU publications. In fact the EU journals may find themselves surviving by publishing foreign papers.
Ehm why not get the revenue from ads like other websites? And with that make it open access and also no cost to the writers. I am sure a lot of companies would be dying to put in more ads on relevant scientific contents.
In a lot of publications, reviewers volunteer their time, so that doesn't have to factor into the cost. Publishing online is extremely cheap, and anyone who needs a printed journal can cover the cost of printing themselves. There's no need to transfer cost of printing to people who never use the printed material. A lot of publishers are fleecing authors and readers, and they get away with it because of momentum: authors want to publish in journal X because that's what everyone reads, and readers want to read journal X because that's where everything gets published. Either the authors or the readers (or both) pay more simply because the journal is "prestigious".
Make the paper version readers pay for the paper version and the internet version for free. what about server? 2.5 millions article a year is nothing and can be paid by fund raising. Believe it or not, the people reading these kind of papers are not stupid. We'll pay. Paying for an article that didn't help you in your research is frustrating. Finding a college account when you're not in college anymore is difficult. This whole thing needs to change.
They should have cost goals per article with a minimum amount require to access. After reaching its goal the article should become free for everyone. Other organisations could charitably go and spend money unlocking articles for everyone.
I guess it all depends on the Ultimate Goals. IF I were a Scientist who wanted to continue my research & development, I'd put together all that I've done so far, both successes & failures, & share them so I can continue my work(s). I could go with the plan where I invest in the publication & then I expect to be paid for each sold publication (each copy is worth one raw book plus enough interest to pay me back, up to 100% because of how much I've paid the publisher, & then split 50/50). The amount of Profit should be enough for 'Rainy Days', Charities, and/or Business Expansion and/or Improvements.
I would like all science papers to be free and open, and when I've researched topics for school assignments I found to many papers behind paywalls. So I was stuck reading the summaries other people wrote. and often times they didn't understand it either. BUTTTT institutions need funding to stay afloat so they have ability to publish them and its kinda a niche audience that will be reading them anyways so a paywall makes sense from business perspective. But someone on the Discovery staff is oh man I don't want to pay for this it should be free.
Could you please make a video explaining in detail the process of how a scientific paper gets puplished in a scientific paper, explain how scientific reviews (2ndary sources) are essential fot the understanding of the state of the art of research in a domain, and how research institutions allow to make the scientific consensus to emerge. I am struggling against climate science denialists, who say that the scientific process is rigged.
I like the open access more because university or foundations will more likely to pay for someone to publish a paper rather for someone who just want to read it.
The money must come from somewhere, so let the authors and publishers decide for their works. Artificial pricing and forcing "free" anything never works out well.
Knowledge at its core is what made us different from all other species on this planet. Our ability to share knowledge is the foundation of what makes us human. To horde knowledge in any form I feel is an affront to our very foundation as humans. All knowledge, yes ALL, needs to be shared freely. I agree fully that the journals are a valuable resource and serve a purpose, but to restrict access to only those with enough money or connections, violates the fundamental principles of what makes us human. And my feelings on this translate to far more then just scientific papers. All knowledge needs to be available to everyone if we are to live up to our ideals and progress as a species.
How about putting these costs within the budget? Also, while they're at it, how about they leave space in the budget for replicating the studies by an independent group? (Unless it has some other label, like exploratory study, which wouldn't have any scientific merit, but rather as it sounds, just get a vague idea of how that part of the world works, without any rigor.) I'm probably wrong about this, please inform me.
This is an important issue. But it goes beyond just the what pay model is used. As it stands now there seems to be STRONG evidence that content/results are being favored (or not) not due to facts and science but due other influences. Thus we are getting a slew of reports like "water has no calories!" OK, its true and factual... but does it add to knowledge?... nope but publishers love it, it doesn't "rock the boat". So we get stuff like, "New use for old drug!, it reduces wrinkles too!"...
All that effort trying to figure out how to share these papers would be better spent in figuring out a better system of publishing, and dissemination that doesn't involve charging these exorbitant fees for it. You'd think an entire race wouldn't be stupid enough to allow limitation of their own advancement on such a trivial factor like money.
Science data should be published for free, paid by tax payers. if government were to do it, it would cost too much. so provide a grant to organizations that would publish and maintain the system for publishing, reviewing, etc. With stipulation that that organization be completely transparent about exactly how the grant money is spent to offer the service.
I am of the opposite view. What about publishing a book? If the author went to public schools, then his/her knowledge has been paid for already! Should s/he publish for FREE??? All people involved in working to produce and disseminate science should earn from their hard work. Reviewers are the GATEKEEPERS of science and they are not paid for their work. Working to publish papers is NOT A CHARITY. While scientific advance sooner or later benefits people at large, these final users of science (most of the time) do not need and probably do not even want to have access to specific data reported in scientific publication. From what I have seen the last decade (explosion of number of papers produced), publishers need to launch more journals. I feel that the overarcing publishing model we have is more-or-less fine. What probably needs to be re-addressed is what gets published, at much does it cost, and where. At present I feel this is PRETTY MUCH fixed, starting from the funding bodies!
Imagine the exponential increase in scientific progress if everyone had free and open access to everyone's journals
The thing is I am beginning to believe we are at the start of a "kind of" electronic hive mind. That information can be disseminated so fast via the internet that we will have an explosion of new science. But only if we can access it. Edit The internet is like the millennial's Gutenburg Press.
Sounds like the concept of the World Brain developed by H.G. Wells. You could say that the history of the recent information revolutions is a history of the World Brain. But paywalls behind crucial information is holding back its potential.
The only problem is that a lot of scientific papers are very hard to read unless you have a background in that field. It took me a few years to finally be able to read chemistry papers comprehensively. Also, most papers are flawed and uneducated people who read them can spread false news. It happens all the time already
redman777ful
I do understand there would be a learning curve for the majority of the public. They would need to become aware that 9 out of 10 published papers are flawed although that does not necessarily mean the conclusion is flawed. I think the ability to have several billion people looking for those flaws would find them faster.
redman777ful
More public discourse is always better, even if facts are not conveyed perfectly. The world will be better educated for it.
And the real value in this would be from experts in the field, and experts in other fields even, benefiting from open access to others' works. Also the potential for way broader and comprehensive peer-review means the quality of science would be better all-around.
How do you make it free?
Take 1% from the international military budget and give it to science.
David Harford you mean the American military budget
Well the american military budget is >50% of the world's military budget... so 2% of america's military budget = ~$11.39b
and regulate the shit out of it
Better yet, take 1% away from the ludicrously bloated and overfunded social programs and welfare paying the lazy to not work from their cradle to their grave, and you'll have some 10 times more!
Do both to satisfy your ignorant agenda, and simultaneously fund what deserves to be funded...
Agreed. Government is only complicated when you need to serve humanity, AND your 'sponsors'.
Personally I despise the pay for model. When someone references a paper whether in a lecture or paper I always try to verify their information. The way the system currently works I could spend hundreds of dollars every month just trying to make sure the information I was given is correct.
Not for free. Your university still pays for it, which means that it's basically included in your tuition (or future taxes). Still, it is true that both scholars and students generally have unfettered access to these papers.
I'm not sure what your area of study is but mine is communications & media and for my research, I don't pay for it as I just use publicly available material such as online news articles, books from the local/campus library, online magazines or setting up interviews if need be.
While I believe science in general needs more money, the people who need science the most won't be willing to pay for it.
One word: sci-hub
dot cc
dot tw
ELSEVIER VS SCI-HUB
Elbakyan is the messiah.
thanks. had no idea
I thank Alexandra Elbakyan for making things easy for students like us, who cannot afford those high priced research papers from which even scientists cannot benefit.
Sci-Hub is my temple.
and Alexandra is the priest.
That woman is one extremely smart cookie. What she has done for the scientific community cannot be measured or expressed in words.
If you want *cutting edge* science you should subscribe to "scientific scissor" because it beats "scientific paper."
Master Therion get out
Brilliant
Master Therion we will we will rock you, with Au, Fe, Li, k , Ca2, Si.....
Master Therion hey dats pretty good
UUUUWWW...Edgy....
Imagine a Wikipedia charging $20 for viewing a single article. No they just ask for donation few times a year to run the world's largest knowledge base. I am happy to support them.
2:22
Servers and bandwidth are already paid for with Internet access service fees (your Internet provider that you pay every month and the institutions Internet service fees that they pay every month).
So, no, there is no additional cost involved in publishing online. That ability is already paid for.
I can guarantee you that, if scientists and journals simply stopped printing paper and everyone went with the open access model, then yes, everyone would be reading their science journals online and yes, it would be free to read all science papers and all the costs would be covered.
Its the hosting servers and its bandwidth that needs to be paid for by the publishers and thus that cost is going to go to the consumers regardless.
"Servers and bandwidth are already paid for with Internet access service fees" That's wrong..
even if BigRalphSmith got something wrong... the ammount of money that has to be paid for web storage and traffic is almost nothing compared to the whole printing and shipping process...
its like using youtube compared to dvds...
(not that old movies & shows would be cheap to watch legally...)
Sci-Hub? Alexandra Elbakyan? Anyone?
Samuel Serna Wills I was wondering if anyone was going to mention this.
I thought about including it, but Sci-hub doesn't really have anything to do with *why* papers aren't free. Taking the papers without permission and hosting them so others can read them is a Robin Hood model; taking from the "rich" and giving to "the people."
Someone paid for the papers that were taken and re-hosted. Those papers were downloaded using 'stolen' authentication credentials from educational institutions (students pay for that access with their tuition), researchers (who pay for papers with their hard-fought grants), R&D departments, etc. Again, *someone* paid for that knowledge.
I feel like this is a sidebar to the wider conversation, though, an interesting one. Sci-hub's taking and re-hosting of papers that were paid for by someone else misses the point relative to why the papers aren't just free in the first place.
NOTE: I struggle to read these papers without breaking the bank too! Personally, I can't help but enjoy the effort, but it's not a real solution to the actual problem with access.
@@TraceDominguez Really no one responded to that shield of a response after 3 years. Wow. That video was nothing more than excuses as to why it should not be free. You claimed that hosting all that stuff is has a cost. Sci-hub is providing the hosting for free to everyone, so that's a mute point. You claimed that most of these research are already paid for with tax money, that's why it should be free. You claimed that reviewers need to be paid, who developed that system of reviewers anyway. All these layers of review were created to benefit the business model. Peer Review can be voluntary... just like when I had to review and grade my classmate work. Authors who financed their own research don't need a publisher to get the material out there, a simple website would suffice, search engines will pick it up. It's 2020.
NOTE: At least you can still afford to read them. Many can't.
@@ravilamontagne9836 Guess who's not going to answer?...
You can add to your argument that, aside from morals and economics, sharing information is just vital for science to work properly. This publication and, in general, economical model heavily hurts science and, by extension, human welfare in general. We are capable of just so much more...
Hail the queen
Bandwidth does not cost all that much for textual documents, worst case just use torrents to distribute.
bandwidth cost nothing for papers. so much money among universities and they cant handle a server with
@@katakouzina but muh PDFs
I think that servers are cheap enough to be run whit just random donations
Wikipedia can do it, no reason scientists can't do it.
the scientists need to be paid too
Laughs in Scholarpedia... www.scholarpedia.org/article/Main_Page
Magazines usually don't pay researchers.
NoobMonkey_ Most Journals don't pay scientists.
Here are the science publications listed in the vid.
Science AAAS: www.sciencemag.org/ (Mostlye Paywalled)
PLOS ONE: journals.plos.org/plosone/ (Open Access)
MacMillan Publishing - Nature: www.nature.com/nature/index.html (Mixed)
RELX Group: www.relx.com/Pages/Home.aspx (Mixed)
Support the model you favor!
Thank you for the links. I may be disabled and on a fixed income but my brain isn't dead. Learning is still a never ending journey especially when you don't understand and have to research.
Keith Durant What's your disability? Is it cognitive or physical? 😂😄😆😃😅
Laughs in Scholarpedia... www.scholarpedia.org/article/Main_Page
John Doe
Really you want to go there...okay. It's 5 herniated cervical discs and a dislocated 3rd cervical vertebra. Fortunately the spinal cord is still intact but the legs get a little iffy sometimes.
Fortunately that means I can grow my medication. Have a good new year!
Erudite I use Deepdyve as well! It's like Netflix for papers ;)
if Wikipedia can do it for free, some smart scientist can figure it out.
Wikipedia does not do it for free. They ask people to make donations a few times a year in order to remain ad free.
illyounotme interesting haven't heard of aaron dude. might have to do some reading.
Liber Khaos please do not over think my comment.
Dammit man, I'm a scientist not an economist.
JTN
haha, but aren't there economic scientists?
Research should be public access. If that research is used for a for profit product there should be an honor system where an equitable percentage of profits is agree upon.
I don't know if this problem still exists but there used to be criteria for university researchers that ended up being "publish or perish". This used to lead to a bunch of papers with very little added between papers on the same subject by the same researcher(s). You'd think something significant was added between papers but not so. I think there probably is still a lot of useless publishing of papers out there .. waste.
I don't know how to fix the problem in an economical way. Maybe issue CD's and have anything printed on paper done where it's economical .. like Korea. I was asked some ridiculous amounts here in Canada for 10 to 20 copies of a unbound book. 50 with a very nice cover with shipping to Canada, from Korea, for the same price.
Research papers are usually pieces of a bigger picture. Being able to 'Google' a subject and not having to make the same discovery over and over because you did not have access to the information I would think is a problem that scientist have had. So I think search engines are the way to go. Maybe in order to access all research you need to register you personal information. Almost like checking out a book at a library.
The papers are submitted for free, and academics review the papers for free. The publishers are the only ones making a profit. :)
www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2273243/Study-finds-Americans-likely-things-good-community.html
Most of these scientific research and salaries of the scientists is already paid for by grants given to them by governments, corporations, NGOs, institutes, etc who all have an invested interest in the research.
The main problem is the publishing company and who will pay them to publish the scientific journals. Ink and paper does cost money and someone will have to cover those costs.
Thank you for providing all these studies for free Dnews
vikas arya he actually make money
I think what he/she meant is that we pay nothing for watching these. But yes, they do make money out of ad rev.
Yes we do. We pay monthly internet service. Which in my case is $80/month for unlimited data
MrFunnyMonkey where the funk do you live?!
Oh yeah, I thought those aren't counted already. But still, as far as I know, they don't get money from us through our monthly internet bills. Their main source really is ad revenue.
so you can have hundreds of gigabyte of data on the cloud for free but we can not have a free hosted, free peer-reviewed research paper. I don't thin cost is the issue.
nothing is free. If you're getting "free" cloud storage, read the Terms of Service. Google/Facebook/etc aren't free at all, you're paying by giving them access to your private information.
True. So...if we host academic content in a free cloud..google/facebook will have access to it...Good...so whats the problem??....no matter how you try to justify it this pay-for-access publishers are a big rip off, but not as much as the pay-to-publish scumbags.
Trace Dominguez Yet I don't personally and directly have to pay any money. I could post a downloadable PDF of a peer reviewed paper on facebook, and neither I nor the people reading it have to pay money. Isn't that strange? This scenario conforms to neither of the two possibilities mentioned in the video.
As a scientist, I believe in the open access model which would allow free access to the reader hence greater dissemination of the author's works. The author can pay the costs usually through their own grants or institution funding.
Just use sci-hub.
Put in a link to ANY research-oriented thing(or publication number for IEEE), and you can download it for free.
Just like you're supposed to be able to. Upvote this so as many people as possible can see it.
Sorry if this was already posted (couldn't find it) but first, thanks for the story. Second, while it's true publishing costs money, you neglected to mention that commercial publishers tend to charge rates using a pricing scheme similar to kidnapping. Highly regarded journals can cost tens of thousands of dollars per year and universities must pay the ransom or be left out of the scholarly conversation. Not to mention names, but some "academic" publishers have ranked among the most profitable corporations worldwide in the past, and these always increasing costs are a major reason why a college education has become impossible for many otherwise-worthy working-class students who lack top grades.
"Aaron Swartz", never forget.
As a graduate student, I prefer the open-access model, because I can budget to get my paper reviewed and published, and if others needed to pay for the ability to publish, then papers would be more polished to have a better chance of publication. This makes it hard for cash-strapped researchers to publish, so having a dual-charge option where they pay less and the article costs some smaller amount to get makes sense.
I know that when I see a paper that costs over $10, I figure out if it's actually worth it to my research. If so, I just look at what's available (figures, references, etc), which usually gives me the gist of the paper. I think that the researchers would rather their work get read rather than fading into what is essentially "noise" in my research. Because honestly, I have yet to find a paper where I couldn't get the contents from their sources and from papers that cite them.
That said, sometimes the publisher does add significant value to the process or articles, and then I'm fine paying. For example, UpToDate is a medical database that literally has articles included within the week they publish. They provide summaries at different levels of expertise, and a host of valuable tools and references, and they should be able the charge a significant amount for their suite, because it is a huge value add. It's when publishers do little more than collect articles and think they should be able to charge for being a library that I get annoyed.
Nah, come on. Yes bandwidth costs money, but text? As just plain ascii text you could put every medical paper in the world onto a thumbstick. Hyperbole yes, but the point is that saying the cost of the bandwidth stops the industry from sharing text information is weak. People wanting to make money off other people's work is the simple truth.
I somehow managed to make a BlogSpot account without paying anything. If I published studies on academic journals, I could easily then copy and paste these studies onto BlogSpot. It would be entirely possible and at no cost to me or those reading it for me to have all of my published studies available on BlogSpot.
If money comes from the public coffers either through direct tax money or tax exemption status, then it should be open-access for the public good. It's a public service.
credibility is the biggest factor behind publications. I have seen to many self published papers that just reference the authors other works. now to many Internet wonders happen with out validation.
Why not just self-publish, then the peer-review process could be through a seal-of-approval system.
A fraction of the DEA's budget or NSA domestic spying budget would cover the cost of distribution of scientific papers for free.
If the science is paid for from donations or government funding then there is no reason not to pay for the publication of it. Should be part of it seems like common sense to me.
Servers are expensive, but bandwidth is not expensive. The bandwidth excuse is one of the traditional ways companies hoard money when it domes to server space or ISP fees. In reality, bandwidth is sold as a specific product when, in reality, usage costs a company almost no money unless the traffic is very heavy.
Even the bandwidth loaned out to companies is dirt cheap, with a just a few dollars per TB, and scientific papers, regardless of popularity, are not using many TB of data every month.
But considering the issue of should this science be free? It's nice when something is open to the public, as I read from a lot of journals, but I do not believe we should be forcing models on companies.
So giving trillions in grants from tax payer money with no return ever and then letting them sell the discovery/data for a profit to someone....... You're ok with paying twice for stuff?
Darth Obscurity I believe in economic freedom, not bureaucratic control, so yes, I'm perfectly fine with that. I'd rather governments not even give the grants to be fair, and for research to be paid for by private demand as it should be.
Global Warming Skeptic What were working conditions like before they began regulating businesses? What private demand is there to keep prices where everyone can afford them instead of maximizing profits for things like food? What was the starvation rate before social safety nets and things like minimum wage? Accident rates before safety laws and OSHA? I'll agree that regulation has gone overboard, but unregulated markets are historically far worse.
Darth Obscurity I am not arguing for a 100% free market. I believe that food, clothing, and shelter are all rights, but when you go beyond survival necessities, it gets to be nonsense.
Fact is that things did not improve because of those regulations. Technology improved our lives, particularly the Industrial Revolution, which freed many people from back breaking labor once required to survive.
Science literature is not a survival necessity, thus should not be regulated by any bureaucratic body.
Regulations absolutely improved peoples' lives. Otherwise we'd still be in the post-industrial but pre-Homestead and Blair Mountain days when it was common for people to work 10 hour days 6 days a week for almost no pay, usually starting around age 10-12 or younger, in unsafe conditions.
A lot of scientists dual publish - they send to a journal, but also offer it free to the public on their own websites. I get it that if you want the services of a publisher, someone has to pay. My experience though, is that the fees for single copy downloads seem exorbitant - often as much as $40, particularly since you don't really know if you'll find the publication useful until after you've paid. You're basically buying mostly sight unseen, and you can't return it.
Fund science with tax money?! That would mean the wildly rich would need to pay into the system. We can't have that happen.
If scientific journals in the US were funded by tax money, it would be catastrophe. Any journal publishing paper in which the future president "don't believe in" would loose the support immediately.
TheUglyGnome You definitely have a point, but there are ways to get around that obstacle. We need to push for less corruption in our government or else it's going to fail us in every respect, not just science.
TheUglyGnome But you could also make that same argument against the president having any amount of power whatsoever. How about instead, the system should be set up in such a way that complete idiots like Trump can't get into power?
the value-add is metadata: peer review, pre registration, etc. universities should be able to host their own papers for basically zero marginal cost; but might still be willing to pay for the extra data that lets others know that those papers are actually of some value (and users may be willing to pay to know that there not reading junk (and sue when the journal fails to properly vet)
The issue is not that publishers charge money for access to their publications, but that they charge as much as they do. If you're a professional scientist, working in industry or academia, your personal access to published papers is effectively free because your institution picks up the tab for the journal subscriptions. (How academic institutions get their funds is more complex than the average citizen is aware, and off-topic here). The problem is that if you're a "civilian" who wants to read a scientific paper that isn't "open-access", then you're faced with a cost of something like $50 for a few pages. This pricing is aimed at industrial customers whose pockets are deep because such costs are ultimately passed on to the consumer. Scientific publishers don't seem to understand that there is a market for their material in the public at large, and that they could sell a hell of a lot more copies of their articles if they charged a nominal few bucks.They've already covered their initial production costs - the rest is apparently just greed or stupidity. But some university libraries will let you access their resources for a modest annual fee. Just my opinion, as they say.
One of the most under-appreciated aspects of the Gutenberg Press was the plethora of little pamphlets that began to appear; "How to build a brick wall", "How to thatch a roof", "How to make a pair of shoes''. Within decades, the guild systems were largely extinct; freed from the suffocating constraints of skill secrecy, and led to a rapid upward-swing of technological innovation from that point forward.
Ironically, the scientific diaspora embraced the antiquated guild-like system, morphing itself into an institution in which information was only made available to the select few organizations and industries capable of purchasing the very expensive subscriptions, limiting the public to a menu of click-bait; short, often inaccurate summaries of yellow science journalism.
This has to change. Now.
As an academic currently working on my Masters in International Relations, we are privileged to have access to virtually all research papers for free through our University subscription system (both hard sciences and soft sciences). Many universities have this system, enabling students to freely research other works in leading journals around the world for their academic purposes.
With that said, let's be very real here. The average citizen would not have the foggiest clue what the hell they were reading if they had access to all of the wonderful scientific literature that is produced on a regular basis around the world. They don't understand the format or process, and they likely would not understand 80% of the words that are being used.
The only way to tackle that hurdle is to scientifically educate the masses, especially with regards to critical thinking skills and the ability to analyze and absorb the information being delivered in a scientific paper, and unfortunately, especially here in the United States, most people are about as sharp as a bowling ball and have zero willpower for such things.
In short, the (public) schooling and educational system has to be seriously changed and improved, in particular putting far more effort regarding STEM.
As it broke college student its disheartening when you find the prefect paper only to see that paywall comes up. Open access is a gem
research should be hosted by the government given that hosting a research paper site should be like 1/1000th the cost of the NSA spy servers.
Jupyter notebooks, once called ipython notebooks, are a way to present articles with data, processing and results in a form that can be rendered as a web page and printed. Since the underlying format is a notebook, data and processing programs can be published and rerun as reproducible results. There are many disciplines where notebooks are used, and they can even be used as wikis. Jupyter supports Markdown Format so people can reply via context to notebooks. The content does not have to be science, it could be used for any discussion. Jupyter notebooks could become an alternative to blogs and social media sites for serious, detailed discussions. If notebook servers could be scaled they could support many uses and do that better than social media and blogs.
Couldn't the government just pay for it? Should be easy if they just make small military cuts.
Long live Sci-Hub!!!
I'd say "Have the governments of the UN or the EU or the US pay for these", as spreading the costs to all nations above a certain GDP would make it a really tiny portion to each. However, I've been looking at the US and UK government recently and... well, that way lies madness, corruption, and unfathomable ineptitude.
Publishing costs are fixed costs. Massively reducing charges to view will allow many more people to access the journals while still recovering the costs. Also advertising and other means of revenues should be explored. Journals should be economically accessible to both authors and readers. And it should be exclusively online. If a researcher does not use the internet, the person should not be researching!!! And who needs to subscribe to a 200 page journal if the person finds just 20-30 pages worth of material of interest? One can just get the papers printed. It would be cheaper.
Imagine if authors actually got a fair cut of the access fees. It’ll be like a viral RUclips video where the creator might earn for a long time
We could move scientific journals to the background without affecting revenue. We could just create a Publicly funded Registration of Education for Citizens and Foreign Nationals who purchase access, or achieve status through benefiting their field of research in some way.
All registration would be Federal, Like a Passport. Your virtual Passport would collect a record of your credibility, such as relevant experience, level of study achieved, and access to information granted.
This could be used as a Global Education System, offer a Market for distribution of education resources, and halt the era of disinformation in its tracks.
This would act like a Wiki where credibility is only achieved through relevant knowledge and the ability to provide links to proof in the scientific journals that make up the infrastructure behind the scenes(for a price$).
Education could be free for everyone, and vetted entirely based on knowledge, rather than politics. Yet still make enough money to generate profit for the publishers.
joshua43214
your delusional idiocy is the only thing preventing something like this from happening.
Zenn Exile I will just watch feminism and globalism destroy that decent idea
This could seriously stall scientific and technological progress.
If you think about it nothing is more important. This determines how fast we develop better energy sources, cures for disease, space exploration, etc... Everything that improves humanity over the long-term is encapsulated in scientific progress. Our society and all aspects of public policy, in fact I'd say all aspects of life should be structured accordingly.
If money has to be spent even on the internet then the government should subsidize the cost and ban both the author or the reader from having to pay.
Is water wet?
DNews: "More research is needed"
It's probably already done, but why not a free digital paper with an optional pay-for physical copy subscription (and to order papers previously published individually)? That, plus donations might suffice to cover server costs and the like.
Knowledge is free but at a cost
Severs and bandwidth don't matter that much. Arxiv works fine, after all. The thing that you're paying for, according to the journals themselves at least, is the peer reviewing process.
Open Access is a successful business model. Probably BioMed Central, now part of Nature-Springer Publishing Group, is the pioneer in this business. While for the readers it's like a blessing, for some authors the unusually high publication charge is something beyond their reach. If your organisation (institution) has no OA policy you'll have to pay a massive amount of money out of pocket. Most of the OA publishers adopted a fee waiver policy for low-middle income countries though.
It's nice to know that a lot of scientific journals are hindering scientific progress because of their price gouging.
Why not just go all out, eh? I mean, why not make it so that you have to have 1 subscription which has a monthly cost just to have the privilege of paying per paper to review and then if they say yes, paying again per approved paper to get it published, and then they have to pay another subscription per monthly basis even though they're already paying monthly subscription just to be able to have the privilege of being able to pay per copy of their own published papers, and general readers of the journal's journal articles have to pay a monthly subscription fee to have the privilege of being able to pay per copy per journal article?
Maximum price gouging!!
Man charging man for their curiosity on the expansion of human knowledge is a testament to the greediness that defines humankind
Simple suggestion. Makes the journals free to academic institutions immediately on publishing. Businesses have no problem paying to remain cutting edge, as well as those with the money to keep up. After a reasonable period, say 1 year after publishing, then the archived journal becomes freely available to all in a digital only format.
It's quite disgraceful that scientific knowledge costs either the scientists themselves or the public who's trying to gain the knowledge. Regardless of the real world reasons for this, something needs to be done, some kind of RUclips system with ads or whatnot would be great. Cmon RUclips, get into the scientific paper publishing, we'd all be great full for it
Cheapest way to get access to, well most scientific papers is to just enroll in a uni. At least here the uni pays the bill and students and faculty get free access. Alternatively you can get a starving uni student to get you the necessary paper.
We should have a science tax. Use it to pay for basic tech for all and accurate unbiased information on the web.
Just cut the military funding by even 1% and that should be enough to cover science tax, and pretty much everything else with a ton left over.
But put advertisements on it
Exactly what I thought. But then again, it could turn ugly. They will take control on those journals and researches.
aizat27 True.
I was thinking you could limit advertising strictly to approved manufacturers of science equipment though.It wouldn't take a huge amount of revenue to keep it running. I mean, I'm not generally a huge fan of commercialising academia, but if the site were displaying ads for telescopes and centrifuges, that seems pretty benign, even useful.
but then again, you give companies control over science magazines. its not really about the products (that part sounds somewhat useful), its about being influenced in decision making.
the question is: how can we gurantee everyone acess to a broad variaty of current scientific works. the answer is libraries. :|
For my research I will read this journal by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson but first I should watch this video about the Samsung Galaxy S7.
I'm wondering why they don't serve advertising to fund online papers.
illyounotme They've probably already thought of it. I think it might be too inconsistent for publishers to use advertising. It's like blogging. If you blog if you want to make advertising money on it you have to write a lot, and write popular. Science journals are likely not a good place to put ads. Though I could be wrong about that.
sitting here trying to answer a question my professor asked that I don't have time to go to the university library and access, but the paper that DOES answer it is $25 online.
Screw that. Sci hub it is. I will pay a reasonable price for convenience (0.25 to 0.50 USD to read a paper as a consumer? sure. $5 a month for access to the entire journal's articles? sign me up) but I will inconvenience myself with piracy when the only legal option is designed to take advantage of me.
Make all science publications be paid for by taxes, something so vital to our modern society should be paid for by everyone!
Why not just charge the way people charge with other media? Have it be free for education, and then have different corporate licensing options. In this way companies like IBM can spend a little dough and everyone gets a free ride. RIP Aaron Swartz
Why don't we have a wikipedia of scientific papers, with only recognized good scientists allowed to become editors?
they should put ads on the side of the papers and you can pay to get rid of them, that way you make money of everyone and everyone still gets to see it.
I can understand the traditional model and why it would be such a popular choice. Making authors pay seems like vanity publishing; a ridiculous way to get legitimate science into the public scene unless the author controls the entire product and not the publisher. Open-access sounds spectacular, but again someone does have to pay for all the work involved with publishing(online or hardcopy) so where would those funds come from?
I'm not in favor of a paywall, but charging reasonable fees for subscribers or using advertising revenue to pay for the publishing, along with converting scientific journals to non-profits that can also accept tax deductible donations, seems like an ideal solution. Until we have an unlimited renewable energy source, the world isn't free; everyone has to have some income to live.
The Government should pay.
Scientific research is financially supported by grants from governments and non-profit foundations, yet the publication of the results of that same research is not. That doesn’t make any sense and has led to the big journal publishing corporations like Elsevier, Springer, etc, putting the work of scientists behind “paywalls”. Free access to what other scientists have done is _essential to the progress of science,_ which is being hampered by this crazy system.
Yes, but we no longer need to publish when we can go paperless on the internet... the community will do pear reviews through college grad degree cross checking.
Strange that nasa’s entire budget costs a fraction of a penny to tax payers but scientific research cost over $30 per article on top of taxes... so why don’t we just pay taxes for a government mainframe or non profit origination
public funded journals. I dont see why is this so complicated. The benefits of public funding of science is so obvious that pretty much every modern nation does it. Its the most obvious thing to also facilitate the publishing and access to these studies by the means of public funding.
It'd be nice if it could be done in a pay-what-you-can model where universities pay a chunk, researchers looking for previously done studies pay a chunk, etc. Not sure it would still cover all costs though.
How about scientific research and scientists receive their salary/funding from grants (whether it'd be from governments, corporations, NGOs, institutes, etc) and the journals be published for free with the publishers receiving a cut of the grant money to compensate for publishing costs.
Alternately, scientists can publish their findings for free online should they so choose so long as they still receive funding and salary from the one paying them the grants.
Government funding should help pay part of the cost ... such scientific advances improve society, are well worth promoting ...
I don't hope that the open-access model lowers the qualaty of the papers too much.
If I send a tweet and no one ever reads it again, do my words still exist?
nyyght7 in a server somewhere...
Someone has to select the best papers for peer review, oversee that peer review and select the papers that deserve publication after peer review. The journal has to be printed and distributed. All this costs money. I suspect that the EU may see a significant drop in papers that the EU has paid for getting published, because these journals can't afford to operate at a loss. They may find that the papers that do get peer reviewed and published will be publish by non-EU publications. In fact the EU journals may find themselves surviving by publishing foreign papers.
Ehm why not get the revenue from ads like other websites? And with that make it open access and also no cost to the writers. I am sure a lot of companies would be dying to put in more ads on relevant scientific contents.
In a lot of publications, reviewers volunteer their time, so that doesn't have to factor into the cost. Publishing online is extremely cheap, and anyone who needs a printed journal can cover the cost of printing themselves. There's no need to transfer cost of printing to people who never use the printed material. A lot of publishers are fleecing authors and readers, and they get away with it because of momentum: authors want to publish in journal X because that's what everyone reads, and readers want to read journal X because that's where everything gets published. Either the authors or the readers (or both) pay more simply because the journal is "prestigious".
how about publicly funded, so the payment comes from the government
Unless everyone involved is going to donate their time and resources while they live on the street and starve money has to come in somewhere.
It could easily come from taxes from people who are at absolutely no risk of ending up starving on the streets.
Make the paper version readers pay for the paper version and the internet version for free. what about server? 2.5 millions article a year is nothing and can be paid by fund raising. Believe it or not, the people reading these kind of papers are not stupid. We'll pay. Paying for an article that didn't help you in your research is frustrating. Finding a college account when you're not in college anymore is difficult. This whole thing needs to change.
They should have cost goals per article with a minimum amount require to access. After reaching its goal the article should become free for everyone. Other organisations could charitably go and spend money unlocking articles for everyone.
I guess it all depends on the Ultimate Goals. IF I were a Scientist who wanted to continue my research & development, I'd put together all that I've done so far, both successes & failures, & share them so I can continue my work(s). I could go with the plan where I invest in the publication & then I expect to be paid for each sold publication (each copy is worth one raw book plus enough interest to pay me back, up to 100% because of how much I've paid the publisher, & then split 50/50). The amount of Profit should be enough for 'Rainy Days', Charities, and/or Business Expansion and/or Improvements.
I feel like this video made this topic way to simple than it actually is.
"publishing on internet costs money"
said a free FullHD video on internet
it gets paid via ads
@@TheCollectiveHexagon if 100 MB of video can be sponsored to publish, why some few KB of pdf can't? How are SCI-Hub and Libgen able to do this?
My job or school has always been able to provide the papers. It's really the organisations paying. I do agree they should not be for profit.
I would like all science papers to be free and open, and when I've researched topics for school assignments I found to many papers behind paywalls. So I was stuck reading the summaries other people wrote. and often times they didn't understand it either. BUTTTT institutions need funding to stay afloat so they have ability to publish them and its kinda a niche audience that will be reading them anyways so a paywall makes sense from business perspective. But someone on the Discovery staff is oh man I don't want to pay for this it should be free.
Alexandra Elbakyan
:Hold my beer
Could you please make a video explaining in detail the process of how a scientific paper gets puplished in a scientific paper, explain how scientific reviews (2ndary sources) are essential fot the understanding of the state of the art of research in a domain, and how research institutions allow to make the scientific consensus to emerge.
I am struggling against climate science denialists, who say that the scientific process is rigged.
I like the open access more because university or foundations will more likely to pay for someone to publish a paper rather for someone who just want to read it.
The money must come from somewhere, so let the authors and publishers decide for their works. Artificial pricing and forcing
"free" anything never works out well.
Knowledge at its core is what made us different from all other species on this planet. Our ability to share knowledge is the foundation of what makes us human. To horde knowledge in any form I feel is an affront to our very foundation as humans. All knowledge, yes ALL, needs to be shared freely. I agree fully that the journals are a valuable resource and serve a purpose, but to restrict access to only those with enough money or connections, violates the fundamental principles of what makes us human.
And my feelings on this translate to far more then just scientific papers. All knowledge needs to be available to everyone if we are to live up to our ideals and progress as a species.
How about putting these costs within the budget? Also, while they're at it, how about they leave space in the budget for replicating the studies by an independent group? (Unless it has some other label, like exploratory study, which wouldn't have any scientific merit, but rather as it sounds, just get a vague idea of how that part of the world works, without any rigor.)
I'm probably wrong about this, please inform me.
This is an important issue. But it goes beyond just the what pay model is used. As it stands now there seems to be STRONG evidence that content/results are being favored (or not) not due to facts and science but due other influences. Thus we are getting a slew of reports like "water has no calories!" OK, its true and factual... but does it add to knowledge?... nope but publishers love it, it doesn't "rock the boat". So we get stuff like, "New use for old drug!, it reduces wrinkles too!"...
Science Is extremely interesting Especially today where most new stuff is happening.
All that effort trying to figure out how to share these papers would be better spent in figuring out a better system of publishing, and dissemination that doesn't involve charging these exorbitant fees for it. You'd think an entire race wouldn't be stupid enough to allow limitation of their own advancement on such a trivial factor like money.
Trace, your shirt looks like thousands of your eyes. I can't unsee this.
omg what have you done! I can't unsee it either now!
Captain Capellini it's the phases of the moon!
Open access journals have a tendency to lower their standards to attract more articles.
Science data should be published for free, paid by tax payers. if government were to do it, it would cost too much. so provide a grant to organizations that would publish and maintain the system for publishing, reviewing, etc. With stipulation that that organization be completely transparent about exactly how the grant money is spent to offer the service.
I am of the opposite view. What about publishing a book? If the author went to public schools, then his/her knowledge has been paid for already! Should s/he publish for FREE??? All people involved in working to produce and disseminate science should earn from their hard work. Reviewers are the GATEKEEPERS of science and they are not paid for their work. Working to publish papers is NOT A CHARITY. While scientific advance sooner or later benefits people at large, these final users of science (most of the time) do not need and probably do not even want to have access to specific data reported in scientific publication. From what I have seen the last decade (explosion of number of papers produced), publishers need to launch more journals.
I feel that the overarcing publishing model we have is more-or-less fine. What probably needs to be re-addressed is what gets published, at much does it cost, and where. At present I feel this is PRETTY MUCH fixed, starting from the funding bodies!
The government should help pay for it. It may cost lots of money, but it's science. It'll pay for itself
Have you seen the price of subscriptions to Monthly Muon, or Quark Quarterly ?
Alexandra Elbakyan deserves a nobel prize!