There is a relatively simple alternative. Just declare that if the government pays for most of the research, resulting articles cannot be copyrighted. It is already the case in the United States that most works by US government employees cannot be copyrighted. Once there is no copyright, there is no way to prevent distribution. If people paid to do the research, they should be able to get the results. There really is no excuse anymore for the old publishing System. It was important at one time, but its time has passed.
><i>Sci-Hub, a website that illicitly hosts full copies of papers and is used by academics around the world, is also a big factor, says Joseph Esposito, a publishing consultant in New York City. “Without Sci-Hub the researchers would be screaming at the libraries and state agencies not to cut them off,” he says.</i><p>Well, if you're going to bet your future on Sci-Hub, at least donate to the project and start creating local laws that would allow local versions of Sci-Hub archives.
It's kind of morbidly hilarious how if this spreads to the US at some point MIT will start using a service that they spent lots of effort to stop from being engendered in the first place.
What exactly do these publishers do that causes them to charge so much? Aren't they just hosting some pdfs and keeping editors on staff to look over the papers?
> “Without Sci-Hub the researchers would be screaming at the libraries and state agencies not to cut them off,” he says.<p>I think this is the money quote. The strength they show in contract negotiations is only possible since no access just pretty much means unlicensed access by now.
Am I the only person left who still worries about the incentive alignment problem inherent in the pay-to-publish model? To a first approximation, everyone wants to make more money. Journals under an open access model make more money when they publish more articles, and the fastest way to publish more articles is to lower standards and accept more articles for publication.<p>Researchers also have a strong incentive to publish as much as possible in order to boost their citation counts, which serve as a proxy for prestige these days and which factor heavily into tenure decisions. Since grants and institutions[1] pay for open access publication fees, researchers have an incentive to select "predatory" journals with low standards and high fees. We already see this dynamic developing.<p>In short, all the incentives line up to encourage the publication of a large volume of low-quality research. Science <i>already</i> has a severe problem with junk research, especially in the social sciences where a large fraction of results simply do not reproduce. Do we want to make this problem even worse?<p>I'm sure the specific people involved in the system have the best intentions, but as a matter of history and of human nature, good intentions are powerless in the face of incentives. The most dangerous four-word phrase in human history is "This time, it's different".<p>[1] Google, for example, will pay open-access publication fees.
Discussed a couple days ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17097561" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17097561</a>.
Does anyone know what's the deal with IEEE? Lots of papers I encounter behind paywall are in IEEE Xplorer. I thought IEEE is non-profit institute (for engineers, by engineers). Why do they participate in this? What can we as IEEE members do to change this?