I am in agreement with Stefan. The situation with all commercial publishers (including many scholarly societies) is now unacceptable. I see very little value for the citizens of the world, who either cannot read Northern Science or can't be authors. Closed Access Means People Die, and so do outrageous APCs.
On Fri, Sep 14, 2018 at 1:33 PM Stevan Harnad <amscifo...@gmail.com> wrote: > To combine Peter Suber's > <https://plus.google.com/u/0/+PeterSuber/posts/iGEFpdYY9dr>post with George > Monbiot > <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/13/scientific-publishing-rip-off-taxpayers-fund-research?CMP=share_btn_fb>'s: > The only true cost (and service) provided by peer-reviewed research journal > publishers is the management and umpiring of peer review, and this costs an > order of magnitude less that the publishers extortionate fees and profits > today. > Yes. I am now appalled at the scale of OA APC charges. I have outlined these in https://www.slideshare.net/petermurrayrust/scientific-search-for-everyone slides 3-11 where I contend that probably >1000 USD of an APCs goes to shareholder profits and corporate branding and gross inefficiency. The (failed) Springer IPO effectively argued that they would use the flotation to invest in brands so they could charge higher prices. The effect of APCs on the Global South is appalling (one publisher make no discount for anyone - see my slides). I believe the true cost of publishing and hosting a peer-reviewed scholarly article is less than 200 USD. It's probably true that in some regulated fields (e.g. clinical trials) reviewing needs more input but that's the sort of amount that it costs for a single review cycle, no typesetting (the publishers cost ca 200 USD and it destroys information) and hosting on a public site. Of course many journals do it for zero. The actual transaction costs of preprint servers are about 8 USD. > The researchers and peer-reviewers conduct and report the research as well > as the peer reviewing for free (or rather, funded by their institutions and > research grants, which are, in turn, funded mostly by tax-payers). > Yes > Peer-reviewed research journal publishers are making among the biggest > profit margins on the planet through almost 100% pure parasitism. > Totally agreed. > Alexandra Elbakyan's Sci-Hub <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub>is > one woman's noble attempt to fix this. > > But the culprits for the prohibitive pay-walling are not just the > publishers: They are also the researchers, their institutions and their > research grant funders -- for not requiring all peer-reviewed research to > be made Open Access (OA) immediately upon acceptance for publication > through researcher self-archiving intheir own institutional open access > repositories. > Yes, this is what I refer to as the Publisher-Academic complex > Instead the OA policy of the EC ("Plan S > <https://ec.europa.eu/commission/commissioners/2014-2019/moedas/announcements/plan-s-and-coalition-s-accelerating-transition-full-and-immediate-open-access-scientific_en>") > and other institutional and funder OA policies worldwide are allowing > publishers to continue their parasitism by offering researcher' the choice > between Option A (self-archiving their published research) or Option B > (paying to publish it in an OA journal where publishers simply name their > price and the parasitism continues in another key). > > I agree. I approve of the motivation of PlanS to reassert control, but I doubtb it will lower pricess to the real cost (200 USD) > Unlike Alexandra Elbakyan, researchers are freeing their very own research > OA when they deposit it in their institutional OA repository. > Agreed. It's a pity that in some countries the repositories are scattered and incredibly difficult for machines to search . We need central aggregations like Core, Dare, HAL > Publishers try to stop them by demanding copyright, imposing OA embargoes, > and threating individual researchers and their institutions with > Alexandra-Elbakyan-style lawsuits. > > Such lawsuits against researchers or their institutions would obviously > cause huge public outrage globally -- an even better protection than hiding > in Kazakhstan. > > And many researchers are ignoring the embargoes and spontaneously > self-archiving their published papers -- and have been doing it, > inclreasingly for almost 30 years now (without a single lawsuit). > > But spontaneous self-archiving is growing far too slowly: it requires > systematic mandates from institutions and funders in order to break out of > the paywalls. > > The only thing that is and has been sustaining the paywalls on research > has been publishers' lobbying of governments on funder OA policy and their > manipulation of institutional OA policy with "Big Deals" on extortionate > library licensing fees to ensure that OA policies always include Option B. > > The solution is ever so simple: OA policies must drop Option B. > I think there is a synergistic solution, which is to provide a better search system (especially for STEMM) than Google and WebOfScience. These closed megacorporations are very poor for data and semantic search. They are also completely nonTransparent and unanswerable to us. There is a growing movement for the community to build its own search engines (#dontLeaveItToGoogle) and I am delighted personally to be able to provide some key Open Source (sic) technology for this. slides (35 onwards) What is required now is to build a better system. Not just talk, but build. Would be very interested to hear from like-minded people (on separate channel or @petermurrayrust on Twitter). P. -- Peter Murray-Rust Reader Emeritus in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dept. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069
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