That $35 that scientific journals charge goes 100% to publisher, 0% to authors

They also don&#x27;t pay reviewers. The costs for a journal are only the cost of sending a webpage (which they charge what, $30 for?), the paper journal itself (for some absurd amount each year).<p>They do not pay the authors for the content, they do not pay the reviewers (who are the &quot;added value&quot; they harp on about).<p>They&#x27;re basically a tool that converts tax payer money (the vast majority of those people writing papers are paid in part or entirely by tax payer funds) into private money for the publisher.

Is it strictly true that authors are allowed to send you their papers if you email them? Are they allowed to send the published version, or must they send a preprint? If they can send you the published version, why can&#x27;t they host it somewhere? And if they can only send the preprint version, why not put it up on arXiv anyway?<p>I don&#x27;t mean to cast doubt on the tweet&#x27;s purpose (I agree with it), and for what it&#x27;s worth I&#x27;ve emailed other researchers for paper access as well. I would just like to see some proper legal analysis behind these questions, because I see the same point repeated frequently by scientists who are <i>not</i> lawyers.<p>It would be pretty cool if there were a platform that automated your request to get a paper from an author. I don&#x27;t know how that would be plausible without hosting the papers though, and I imagine that would get into trouble.

I&#x27;m getting fed up with the for-profit scientific journal system. I was recently invited to submit an article to a new journal on computer networking of some kind. They mine publications and just start mailing authors, soliciting publications paid for <i>by authors</i>. I don&#x27;t even work in computer networking! Ugh so I wrote back:<p>Dear XXX,<p>I mean you no personal disrespect. However after reviewing your request, I believe your institution serves no purpose in today&#x27;s publishing world and absolutely will not be paying it USD 1,250 for the privilege of publishing of a paper in a field in which I am not an expert. Such a contribution would in no way advance either Science or humanity, but instead only create more confusion by frustrating several fields&#x27; fledgling efforts to sift the wheat from the chaff using a proper scientific process.<p>Wishing your institution failure in the sincerest capacity,<p>YYY

No scientific journal of any repute pays its authors. Or reviewers.<p>Authors (more precisely, the grants we get to do our research in academia, or our employers in industry) pay the journal for the privilege of publishing there, and offer our services as reviewers for brownie points.

Non-academic here: why distribute electronic copies of a paper through a scientific journal? I can see why publishers existed pre-internet (printing and distributing paper journals costs money), but seems outdated at this point.<p>What&#x27;s the incentive for a scientist to hand over copyrights to a journal?

In this increasingly digital world, the printed and distributed journal seem less and less important. Of course individuals are still free to download and print a paper for convenience.<p>So what if the scientific community&#x2F;industry focused on the real added value. Those are:<p>1. Peer review<p>2. Prestige<p>Because the pre-internet problem of distribution doesn&#x27;t exist anymore (a basic web server to host papers is relatively cheap), that would allow to bypass traditional journals.<p>For that to happen, we would need a group of already reputed and respected researchers to review the submitted articles. But because the journal fees would be avoided, that means the money could be collected to pay those reviewers.

Fortunately everyone in my field puts our papers on arxiv anyway. Sure, the journal will format it differently and maybe catch some grammar mistakes, but the content will be the same.

An interesting point is that if you email the author, they can send you their paper for free legally. Couldn’t a platform be created (essentially an email autoresponder) where you send a formatted request to the author, and the platform processes the request and sends the paper to you on behalf of the author?

They have found a way to bottle prestige which is extremely profitable. It has negative marginal cost and only you can distribute it.

Do the authors own the IP for their journals? I was under the impression that in most instances the IP was either public or owned by the university&#x2F;instition.

The rebellion against pay-walled research publications really needs to be holistically supported by all researchers. The big problem is that lot of &quot;good&quot; journals have also pay-walled publications that they pay nothing to authors but charge ridiculous amount per publication. This includes big names like Nature and several publications of IEEE.

Every time stuff like this comes up I think of these guys <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;discreteanalysisjournal.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;40" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;discreteanalysisjournal.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;40</a><p>This is the best model I&#x27;ve seen for modern publishing

I agree it&#x27;s become a problem and place for companies to milk the system.<p>What is the alternative? There will be costs. How <i>should</i> it be paid for, which both maintains quality and is fair to authors?

why is this a surprise for anyone? of course you don&#x27;t get paid for publishing in a scientific journal.

&quot;we are allowed to send them to you for free&quot;.<p>Keyword: allowed.<p>How can these smart and brave people, that push the boundaries of human understanding and knowledge, act so stupid.

While this is sad, if the scientific journals end up paying the authors, it won’t be 35$ anymore, it will be more(which I am happy to pay). The publishers I am sure won’t be taking a pay cut though!

Does anyone actually access articles on a per-article basis? I would bet the lion share of downloads (and revenues) are institutional subscriptions.

Scihub

Thank God for the arxiv and SciHub

I don&#x27;t see anything wrong with that.

What a racket!

Preaching to the choir and racking up some cheap karma, are we?