All this is an excellent ad for sci-hub, which avoids most of the serious drawbacks of publishers like Elsevier. It was interesting how that was relegated to a veiled comment at the end, "or finding access in other channels". But basically if the mainstream publishers can't meet the need, we do need other channels, and right now sci-hub is the only one that actually works at scale.
Sci-Hub's user flow is so ridiculously friendly, that I'd often use it even when I have credentials to some obscure authorization network. This is true even for the free SSRN which started requiring logging in around the time Elsevier bought them.
Gabe Newell of Valve asserted something very similar:
> "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."
> "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said.
I don't know. Paying $25 or $50 for an article, just to see if it contains something useful is a lot ... And with the realization that the research was funded by tax dollars, that price becomes absurd.
Yeah, in the Steam age the demos have been mostly killed. I guess "Let's Plays" have replaced them? Personally, I still value getting my hands on the beast myself.
Steam will at least automatically refund a purchase within 14 days if the play time is less than 2 hours.
As far as I know you can't get a refund if you don't like an article, but I may be mistaken. If you had that option, paying for a journal article might be slightly more palatable.
The quickest legal way to get a copy of a paper that isn't already accessible as a pre-print is to email the author(s). Usually they don't mind. Hint: email the student, not the prof and you're more likely to get a reply. You can also do this via ResearchGate.
While I agree that access is a problem, I don't know how much I believe Gaben's comment anymore. Sites like Kinguin and G2A are doing very healthy business by selling grey market keys for mild to significant discounts to Steam. Their user experience sucks (like actively unethically user hostile bad). Search is horrible. Pricing is nontransparent, aggressive spammy upselling is rampant. The checkout system makes it feel like your credit card information is being posted directly to the dark web. You have to be careful to buy a key that matches the region where you live. Literally the only thing they have going for them is price.
I'd guess those sites are two orders of magnitude smaller than Steam, but a quick search reveals G2A has 700 employees and 16 million customers, so they can't be doing too bad. If access truly was the problem than these sites wouldn't exist.
I use this Library Genesis search page as portal to Scihub's papers, it's amazing being able to get just about any paper ever, even totally obscure ones from 70 or 100 years ago. I do check Google Scholar first - a lot of recent papers are available online from academic sites, and it's a great way of discovering author home pages.
I've always said that the problem is not framed correctly. Who gives money to the greedy publisher, for basically nothing? Blame them first and the problem will go away.
EDIT: blame the academic management who gives the money to the publishers. This way the publishers will go away to greener pastures.
Blame the academic administrators who demand publications in top tier journals - the same ones who charge a ton for access.
Scientists can publish in whatever journal they please. The problem is that if they publish in most open sources journals (there are exceptions), they aren't counted as top tier and it hurts their career.
Inside the Fake Science Factory is an amazing 2hr talk talk from DEFCON 2018 by 2 German journalists and a British science guy about an investigation into the world of predatory fake journals, conferences, websites. 400,000 scientists involved. Unbelievably huge scam. They wrote bogus papers and presented one at a fake conference. It's a funny talk, if depressing. A great investigation. Maybe the worst is that these fake scientific credentials are then used to sell useless products to dying people.
I think you just created a good argument about the value add of journals! Everyone says "they do nothing!", but what they have, that other people want is a reputation for high impact, important publications. If you get your paper published in Nature, your work will be very highly regarded.
The argument about how much money it's worth to pay for that is another discussion entirely.
Open source implies does-not-cost-anything, but does-not-cost-anything does not imply open source. Open access journals would only be open source if they, you know, made available source code (or source something).
Open source doesn't imply "does-not-cost-anything" at all considering you can still sell open source applications. And yeah, open access is a better word.
Yes, most of the time. Publishers should be blamed because they ask money for a service which is no longer needed. But who gives them the money, nevertheless? Academic management. Researchers have very little to say about this, except if you look at their real behavior (arXiv, sci-hub, etc). However, in management land everything is designed to support the publishers.
When it comes to subscriptions: academic libraries, under pressure of academics. (And in this case, a group of German libraries finally refused to do so.)
When it comes to disproportionally high publishing fees, however, academics do have something to say, because they can often choose to publish somewhere with lower fees. However, that's not really an option as long as their career progression is determined by which journals they publish in. Thus, I think part of the cause there is those who use journal names as a criterion when judging e.g. grant applicants.
> When it comes to subscriptions: academic libraries, under pressure of academics.
Where are these researchers who pressure the academic libraries to buy subscriptions? I never saw them, except if they are in the management.
If we were to speak in market terms, well, publishers are private entities driven by the market forces, right? So in market terms the clients (researchers) manifest a strong preference for other products than those offered by the publishers. Why do they still exist? Does not make any sense, except if we recognize also that the market is perturbed by the fact that somebody still buys their product and forces the clients to consume and to produce it.
> Researchers have very little to say about this, except if you look at their real behavior (arXiv, sci-hub, etc).
If powerful researchers cared, they wouldn’t review for journals they don’t like. Obviously the benefit from doing the reviews is bigger than their preference of Open Access.
> Obviously the benefit from doing the reviews is bigger than their preference of Open Access.
Researchers don't usually benefit from doing peer review: they don't get paid for it, and it eats time they could spend doing research. It's more of a sense of duty they have that they're "supposed" to do those reviews, and I can't really fault them for that.
(Though I would very much encourage them to only review for fully Open Access journals, and respond to review requests with invitations to submit the work to those journals.)
The benefit to reviewing is that it's frowned upon to publish in a conference/journal if you don't review for them. So academics are not just motivated by a "sense of duty": if they don't accept to review then it can become harder for them to publish (which has significant career benefits).
So if you don't review for closed-access venues (which I try to do), you are pressured into not publishing there: and not publishing in closed-access venues is difficult as most papers are collaborations, and usually your co-authors do not share your convictions.
At least in my experience, I don't see any pressure to not submit if you don't review (I'm in ML though, so could be different in other fields).
I think why people review is:
-You should be reading more papers anyway and we like doing it, so why not take it as an obligation?
-I assume that eventually it helps one to get selected to be an area chair or something along those lines.
Yes, I guess that's true, too. But even researchers who do boycott some journals sometimes indicate that they still review for those journals for the above reasons.
Researches benefit from doing peer review so that quality research is maintained. Its part of their job. I don't get
"paid" to put in expense reports for trips on the job, but I have to do them because its a job responsibility.
Right, as I said in response to a sibling comment: "a sense of duty, it's considered part of their job." The sense of duty part is that they could theoretically get away with it if they didn't do it.
Again: a sense of duty, it's considered part of their job. They can certainly choose not to do it, or not to do it for paywalled journals. However, when I suggest that, I often get the reply that that's not fair to those who submit to those journals - often early-career researchers whose career could be greatly helped by publishing there.
Yes, many of them follow the path of least resistance, but not all of them. Even the usual researcher from the middle of the herd votes against publishers with the reading behaviors.
I honestly think that the Oldenburg model (yes, he had good reasons that are no longer relevant) is going the way of the dodo. These companies are fighting a losing battle. They've already lost to pre-print on arXiv.
The future of making money from journals could potentially lie with curation: "these are the papers you need to read this month" with links to open-access papers. Indexing and search that exploits that curation also comes to mind: "these are the papers you should read while researching your problem."
The biggest problem that open-access is going to cause is volume. Although, that been said, that's an existing problem (though far less pronounced) in the Oldenburg model due to bad science.
>The future of making money from journals could potentially lie with curation
Scientists (and lay people) already have access to excellent tools for this kind of thing. Pubmed provides functionality for performing automated and regular searches of their basically complete index of biological literature. https://ncbiinsights.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2013/11/14/setting-up-...
A while ago I made https://whereisscihub.now.sh, which can be of some help. It also lists IP addresses at the moment, so presumably those should still work.
The easiest option is via the Telegram bot. You message it the name of a paper and it sends you a PDF back! And it's unblockable.
If you can afford it everyone should send a few bucks to the bitcoin address donation jar on the Sci-Hub site (1K4t2vSBSS2xFjZ6PofYnbgZewjeqbG1TM - but don't take my word for it) so that Elbakyan can keep developing cool stuff like that.
Unpaywall is just a database of free(libre) scholarly articles. These articles can almost always already accessed at the journal website using the normal way of finding them. doi.org/$DOI or scholar.google.com is another. The problem is not with these articles but the larger number of ones that are behind paywalls the unpaywall. Unpaywall is not what they do (from the blurb on their homepage and a brief look at the site) and a very deceptive name for their site.
That's only the case for so-called Gold Open Access artiles. However, many other articles are put behind a paywall, but also have a version uploaded elsewhere (e.g. arXiv) by their author ("Green Open Access") - Unpaywall helps you find those versions when you hit a paywall.
